It was June, the wrong time of year for a Santa Ana, the hot desert wind that writers like to suggest makes people a little crazy. Less literary types merely note that it toasts the skin and the vegetation, and blows all the smog out over the sea. Since the weather was ordinary “June gloom”—overcast in the mornings and late afternoon—why was everyone acting bizarre?
I felt as if I were living in some real-life version of a Quentin Tarantino movie, its landscape seething with quirky villainy. In less than two days, I’d been called a racist and received hearty encouragement to take a celestial hike. I got intimations of mortality whenever I started my car. A person with whom I’d worked for two years, with studied—if insincere—cordiality, had felt moved to threaten me. My daughter wanted me to date.
And that doesn’t even begin to touch the eeriness of discovering that the entire South Bay area seemed to know a great deal more about Natasha Ivanova than I did. Granted, the coincidence of finding two people with inside information was less than it might have been if we were talking about Greater L.A. The South Bay was just a small section of the big sprawl, and it was not surprising if the rich, who are clubby everywhere, kept tabs on each other. What bothered me was, where were all these people when the trial was going on? If they were social acquaintances, fellow patrons of the arts, invited guests at exclusive parties, why hadn’t they been heard from?
I had a lot of questions, but the answers came up short. Things seemed to be slipping out of control. I hadn’t had that feeling since Michael died, when I’d stopped asking questions I couldn’t answer. There were things I just didn’t think about; that’s how I kept it together. Now my sense of order was under attack.
Still, I had to admit that Natasha—under the circumstances, I thought I was justified in feeling we were on a first-name basis—had me curious. There seemed to be more than one view of her character, and I bet she’d been up to something. Not necessarily something bad, but something. I still couldn’t square the Erté with the aristocratic Connoisseur of the Arts that Mira had described to me. An émigré countess or whatever she had styled herself would presumably have been more interested in Fabergé eggs than in Art Deco-ish Nefertitis with posture problems. I hate to belabor the point, but Erté is not the artist of first choice for collectors who want art for investment and social imprimatur. In the first place, he was primarily a costume designer and illustrator, albeit a glitzy and pretty successful one. Plus, there are too many works available, the price is too low, the style is too accessible, and the masses like him. The kiss of death, for sure.
Besides, I had an ax to grind. I’d just spent several weeks of my life trying to sort out her death, and now I learned that somebody had been holding out on me. I found myself an interested party. It was a strange bond, but a bond nonetheless.
I felt restless and dissatisfied, and not just because I’d caught myself resembling somebody’s Bank Vice President in Mira’s looking glass. The trial was supposed to be over, but all these leftover whirlpools and eddies remained in its wake. For five years—since Michael died—order and routine had sustained me, had made me safe. Now I was sailing in uncharted waters. Maybe the trial would shake things up, I’d thought.
Be careful what you wish for, wasn’t that the saying?
It was still early, so I decided to drive up to Santa Monica to visit the galleries and arrange for the Jensens to view two of their initial choices. Karin Deacon, who had run the prestigious Vendôme Gallery since the heady days of the L.A. art scene in the sixties, was on the warpath.
“Is this an OTC?” she asked, lifting her reading glasses off of her nose and fixing me with a penetrating stare.
“Well, not quite Over The Couch, but more like your instant designer-label collection,” I admitted ruefully. “I’m sorry, Karin.”
We both stepped back to admire the painting. It was very simple, but so beautiful. A slide couldn’t capture it.
“I hate selling the work of an artist I admire to someone who doesn’t know what they’re buying. It just kills me.”
“I know what you mean,” I said sympathetically. “But still…”
She looked resigned. “Well, at least you had the decency not to come in and ask me for a size and color, the way some consultants do. Like it’s a fucking dress, for God’s sake.”
I didn’t tell her I was far too scared of her to let on what everyone knew and no one would admit. When Michael was alive and I was a dilettante ex–art major working “for fun” (certainly not for a living wage) in a gallery on La Cienega, Karin had been a formidable figure, a true “character” in every sense of the word. Her tongue could blister, but she was absolutely dedicated to the artists she represented. In the eighties, she had made a lot of easy money. The Vendôme was still one of the top galleries in the country, but times were different now, requiring compromise. It wasn’t politic to remind her of it.
“Well, at least we might get a good price,” she said at last. She brightened. “And maybe we can bring the buyers along, educate them.”
I remembered Mira’s comment about not wanting to go out of her way to look at art works and had my doubts, which I certainly did not communicate to Karin. I nodded.
“Do these people have any eye at all?” she asked, not fooled by my silence.
“You might say it’s evolving,” I told her.
“From what?”
“From pretty much zero,” I admitted. “The good news is that you can probably influence their taste. Also, they’re interested in having a party to show off whatever they get, so you might get some new customers out of it in addition to the original sale.”
“The good news is that I get to spend hours I don’t have, doing my ‘what is art’ routine for a couple who doesn’t have a clue as to what’s going on?” She laughed. “What’s the bad news?”
“The bad news is that they have a decorator.”
She closed her eyes. “Who?”
“He calls himself Valentin. No last name, at least that I know about.”
“I know him.” She pursed her lips in an expression that boded ill. “I won’t work with him, but I know him.”
“Why not?”
She extended her fingers, touching each in turn to tick off the reasons one by one.
“I don’t like grandstanding. I don’t like tardiness. I don’t like cutting corners. I don’t like him.”
“Oh, dear.” This was going to complicate matters.
“I don’t have any concrete evidence against him, but my gut tells me he’s a sleazebag. I don’t need him. If your clients want to buy from me, they’ll have to work through you. I don’t make exceptions.”
“Okay,” I told her. It was useless to argue; I knew she wouldn’t back down, and anyway it was my problem to find a way to tell Valentin that the other children didn’t want him at the class birthday party. In light of our last conversation, it was a safe bet that he would assume I had somehow shafted him again. He’d exact revenge, too, if he could. It didn’t matter. I needed the Vendôme Gallery and Karin more than I needed Valentin. But I didn’t look forward to it.
When we had wrapped up the preliminaries, I thanked her for her time. “At least we’re holding up our end of the bargain,” I told her. “The painting is first-rate, and if they buy it, they won’t be making some hideous mistake.”
“After I think about it, I’m sure I’ll find that comforting,” she said with asperity. “Tell them this artist’s works should be in museums.” She shook her head. “If museums had any money to buy them.”
I picked up my things to go and then turned back to her. “Karin, have you ever heard of an art collector named Natasha Ivanova?”
She raised her eyebrows. “I don’t think so. Why do you ask?”
“I just got off the jury that convicted her murderer. In the last couple of days, I’ve been hearing things about her art collection, and I wondered if you knew anything.”
“I don’t wish to brag, but if she was a serious collector, I would have heard about her,” she said, pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose. “Still, let me check my records.”
She called up the names on the screen. “No, nothing. What kind of art did she collect?”
“I’m not sure,” I told her. “But she got whacked over the head with an Erté statue and died of her injuries.”
She looked at me over the top of her glasses. Whenever anyone did that, it always reminded me of the girls’ vice principal at my high school, the same one who had the job of scrutinizing skirt lengths for conformity to decency and regulation.
“I trust you’re joking,” Karin said.
I shook my head. “Afraid not.”
She snorted delicately. “Well, no wonder.”
It was rush hour on the freeway, so there was no point in trying to hurry home. Navigating L.A. takes an amazing amount of planning and patience. If you screw up, you can end up stuck under some graffiti-covered underpass for ten minutes at a time, sucking in exhaust fumes.
I stopped at a Salvadoran fast-food stand not far from the gallery and picked up some pupusas, a kind of Salvadoran taco, and yuca con chicharrones. Michael and I used to have the same dishes in a little hole-in-the-wall restaurant with neon beer signs in the window. They were better there, but I just didn’t feel like going back after he died.
“What is it?” I ask him, peering at the unfamiliar food as if it will leap off the plate if I take my eyes away. I am twenty-one and untutored in gastronomic adventures.
“It’s ‘yuca,’” Michael says with a smile. “It’s a root. It tastes like potatoes. Try it.”
I push a bite around the plate with my fork and finally lift it to my mouth. It does taste like potatoes, a little. I smile back. “Not bad,” I say.
He looks into my eyes and takes my hand. “No, not bad,” he says.
My heart expands.
Here is the problem with memories: The less they hurt you, the more you’ve lost of the person you’re remembering. The price of breaking free from the pain is loss of feeling, loss of intensity and clarity.
Mostly, the memories crept up on me at unexpected times, but sometimes I called them up on purpose, to make sure I could still feel them even if they broke my heart. Lately, I’d had trouble remembering the details—What shirt was he wearing? What music were we listening to? If I concentrated, I could find the answers, but it was clear that one day I wouldn’t be able to. The inevitability of it filled me with sadness.
I checked my watch, willing the memory away. A diversion was called for, before I sank into a swamp of self-pity, a state I did not admire but with which I was all too familiar. I knew what I was going to do, but I wasn’t sure why I was going to do it. I got back into the car, consulted the map, and took surface streets to my destination.
I found the place without any trouble; I’d seen the address on enough documents to burn it into my mind. I pulled up beside a palm tree (species: Washingtonia) and parked. Across the street were the very posh offices of Ivanova Associates.
Natasha had died there.
I felt like a veteran returning to the site of some particularly hard-fought battle, with a mixture of exhilaration and dread. What was I doing there? It certainly wasn’t out of nostalgia for the glory days of the trial. It was something more than curiosity, though. I felt drawn to see the place for myself, though I can’t imagine what I expected to find. It was just a building, a generic, upscale, glass-fronted corporate suite. I could see the reflection of my car in its polished surfaces.
There hadn’t been any reason to tour the death site, so we didn’t get a jurors’ field trip to look around and sneak a peek at the personal life of the deceased. I’ve already mentioned the pictures, but those were close-ups of the interior and the body. This was my first view from the street.
I sat there replaying in my mind what I had heard at the trial.
It had been late—or early, depending on your perspective—and presumably pretty dark. I looked around for streetlamps. There was one about a half block away. It was the low-sodium kind.
Ramon Garcia had let himself in with his mother’s key, long after the staff had finished cleaning and gone for the night. Where did he park? I looked around. The entrance to the offices faced a courtyard, so the only parking other than the underground garage, which he presumably would not have had access to, was where I was sitting now.
It made me shiver a little, but maybe it was just the evening clouds rolling in.
Natasha would have parked in the garage and taken the elevator—keyed, I assumed—up to her office on the third floor. The office was dark, so she turned on the light, and—
No, that wouldn’t be right. If she surprised Ramon, he must have been there with the light on already. It was chancy, but you can’t see very well with just a flashlight, and Ramon probably thought he’d be in and out pretty quick.
So why didn’t she hesitate when she saw the light?
Maybe she couldn’t see it until she was too far inside to turn back.
Maybe she was expecting a light to be on.
Why would it be on? Was it always lit at night? Was she expecting to meet someone? If so, why hadn’t that ever come out in the courtroom?
I decided to put that question aside for the moment.
Inside, Ramon was looting the place with abandon when Natasha appeared. He must have heard her and stepped into the executive bathroom just beyond her desk, but not before he’d grabbed the Erté. When she walked by, he’d stepped out of the bathroom and smacked her in the back of the head.
Maybe he hadn’t meant to kill her. Probably not, in fact. But he surprised her, certainly; the coroner’s report showed that there had been just the one blow. Her hands were unmarked, so she hadn’t seen it coming. She couldn’t protect herself.
So what did Ramon do next?
I saw him bending down to inspect the body, taking off his glove to feel for her pulse. She was still breathing for a few minutes after he hit her, so maybe he didn’t know she would die. Maybe she moaned a little, or stirred, and that’s when he touched the statue with his bare hand, leaving a partial print. Maybe he thought about stealing her watch but couldn’t bring himself to do it.
I’d like to think a seventeen-year-old boy didn’t know he was a killer when he coolly collected the answering machine, the money out of her desk, her ATM card, and various other items—all totaling less than three hundred dollars on the street—and put them into the cloth bag he had brought for the purpose.
It was all speculation. Ramon hadn’t testified, and nobody else knew the truth. When they caught him, a short time afterward, he still had the evidence in the trunk of his car. He’d clammed up and refused to talk to anyone. Either he’d seen a lot of cop-and-robber movies, or he was well coached. Maybe he was just smart, but I doubt it. He’d already been caught at just about every minor crime you can think of, beginning when he was ten years old.
But I was getting ahead of the script.
He had his bag. He pulled a dark knit cap onto his forehead and turned out the light. He locked the door behind him. He went down the stairs, the way he had come.
He must have stopped somewhere to put the bag in the trunk. If it had been me, I would have thrown the bag in the backseat and rushed out at all deliberate speed, stopping a few blocks away to transfer the bag to somewhere out of sight, in case I got a ticket or something. Or in case my mother got suspicious and wondered where her car was in the middle of the night. If Ramon did that, too, then all he had to do was walk to the car, open the door, get in, and drive away.
Just a minute or two, in all.
Still, enough time for somebody to see him.
I considered this. The police report said that an anonymous caller had reported a possible burglary. So somebody in the neighborhood must have seen the light or heard something out of the ordinary for the hour.
My head ached a little, and the air inside the car was getting stale. I got out and stretched, looking up at the offices and condos facing out over the street, wondering where the call had been made from.
The windowpanes stared back blankly. I walked up and down the street, looking up. A couple of passersby regarded me curiously, and one, an elderly gentleman with a small white dog, circled back around and discovered I was still there. I smiled at him, and he nodded in return. His look conveyed that he was giving me the benefit of the doubt but that he had his eye on me. I wondered if he could be the caller, but he looked like the type who would have given his name instead of remaining anonymous. And insisted you spell it right, too.
My neck was getting stiff, and I felt foolish, especially since I wasn’t sure what I was looking for. I tried putting myself in the caller’s place. What had he seen or heard?
I swung my attention in the direction it should have been facing all the time, toward the offices of Ivanova Associates. I stood squarely across the street and looked straight on at the building. The flat, shiny surface at street level distorted my reflection like a fun-house mirror.
That’s it. That’s all I could see. The building was so opaque it was impossible to see into the interior offices. I moved down the street to the right, then to the left, all the way to end of the block in both directions.
Nothing.
Okay, I reasoned. So maybe the caller couldn’t see into the offices. Maybe he or she had a clear view of a kid coming out, wearing dark clothing and a knit cap and carrying a canvas bag, and assumed the worst.
Still, if this was a generic there’s-somebody-doing-something-he-shouldn’t-in-my-neighborhood kind of call, how had the caller known it was Ivanova Associates that had been burgled? There were plenty of other offices, their names tastefully advertised on the front of the building, sharing the same floor.
Troubled, I squinted again at the offices (bifocals were just around the corner, too) and got back into the car.
A sense of uneasiness, of something not quite right, haunted me all the way home.