The Los Angeles Museum of Modern Art was a three-story structure made of granite and glass. It resembled a parking garage with windows, and Grant made a point of not venturing an aesthetic opinion on it.
He walked into the building with Emma, and paid the entrance fee for both of them. Apparently that was the limit of the assistance he intended to offer, because he let himself get sidetracked on the first floor by some Van Goghs. She hoped his hands-off approach wouldn’t end as badly as it had last time. She was pretty sure if he’d accompanied her up to Linda’s apartment, she wouldn’t have been shot. Although Linda would still be dead.
The brochure the ticket-taker gave her showed a floor plan of the museum. Emma saw that the administrative offices were on the third floor. That seemed a logical place to start. Leaving Grant to his pondering, she found the main staircase, which could easily have been mistaken for one of the freestanding abstract sculptures showcased in the museum, and went up to visit the third floor.
The unique staircase gave onto a tan-carpeted hall that looked like the interior of every institutional building she’d ever been in. A series of closed doors lined the walls on both sides. No one else was in the hallway. She started walking, glancing at the brass plates screwed to the wall by each door, naming the job title of the person who worked there, though not his or her name. Spotting the one marked “Director,” she stopped and knocked.
When there was no answer, she pushed open the unlocked door and peeked her head in. An outer office, obviously a reception area, was empty but beyond the unoccupied desk was another door, presumably the inner sanctum of the director. She stepped over the threshold into the outer office. No one rushed forward to stop her progress. Budget cuts, probably. Before the economy fell to pieces, undoubtedly an efficient, if not officious, aide, would have mediated between the director and the unwashed masses.
Or maybe the efficient aide was at lunch. Emma skirted the empty desk and tapped on the inner door. She heard a sound of frustration from behind the door, followed by a lengthy pause. The director was in there — or someone was — and she wasn’t going to be put off by someone pretending he or she couldn’t hear her.
She knocked again, more firmly this time, communicating her intention of not leaving. After a moment, the door creaked inward. A portly old gentleman glared at her, breathing heavily through his nose, looking as if he should be in charge of a Victorian-era bank in London and not a museum of modern art in LA. But then looks were deceiving, or so they said. He shifted his glare to the empty reception desk, then brought his glare back to her.
“Do you have an appointment?” he asked, his sparse eyebrows snapping together.
“No,” she said. Years of dealing with temperamental bosses made her add “sir” without thinking. Then, because she’d never let a glower stop her before and wasn’t going to let one stop her now, went on to say, “But if you have just a moment, there’s something I need to discuss with you.”
He glanced over his shoulder, as if the interior of his office could tell him if he had a moment or not. Then he took a step forward, forcing her to step aside or be trampled, and closed the door to his office behind him with a sharp click. They stood together near the desk in the outer office.
Emma wanted to take another step away but that felt too much like retreating, so she held her ground.
“Who are you?” he demanded, breathing heavily through his nose. It was ludicrous to find such a man threatening, but she did.
“My name is Emma O’Brien,” she said. “My brother Paul worked here.”
The director’s brows drew together again and he looked perplexed, a disarming expression that made him a far less intimidating presence. He tugged at his lower lip. That action must have jogged the memory loose because then he obviously placed the name. He nodded, his face relaxing, and said, “Ah. Yes. Paul. Paul O’Brien. That was a tragic … event. What can I do for you?”
It had never occurred to Emma that you could consider Paul’s death an event. She stared at him for a moment, uncertain. She hadn’t planned what she meant to say and didn’t really know why she was there; it was just another impulse. Talk to some people who knew Paul was as far as her thinking had gotten her —
No wonder Grant wasn’t taking her seriously; no wonder Alvarez wasn’t really worried about her interfering with an investigation. She’d have to be a lot more effective than she was for such a thing to happen. Grant was merely indulging her, sorry for her grief, and driving her around to various places was a simple way to express his compassion. Probably hoping that if he appeased her, she’d get it out of her system and leave before she caused anyone any actual inconvenience.
“Ms. O’Brien?” The director was waiting for some kind of answer, and it was too late to develop a plan for this conversation, so Emma said, “I just wanted to soak up the atmosphere, I guess. Talk to some of the people he knew. He liked his job.” She made herself stop firing sentences at him. What did she want that she thought this man could give her?
“He told me all about the museum,” she continued after a moment. “I’m an artist, and he thought I’d like to know about what you were acquiring. I was impressed, for such a new museum — ”
“Ah, yes,” the director said, smiling at her for the first time as she moved to a conversation he could understand. Discussing acquisitions was familiar ground for him. “We’ve been quite fortunate in having generous patrons. Even in the current economic climate, we’ve been able to enjoy quite successful fund-raising. One of the unique — ”
“What I was wondering,” Emma interrupted, not having meant to invite a PR spiel, “was, did he have any friends here? I want to — ”
“Yes, yes,” said the director, interrupting her in his turn. “Of course.” He tugged his lip again, but this time it mustn’t have dislodged a memory because he shook his head and said, “I’m not the person who would know, though. He worked evenings, doing custodial work.” He must have noticed her wince because he hurried to add, “No, no, he did more than that, as I’m sure he told you. He was also an excellent carpenter, and we could count on him to build or repair a display case if we needed. Paul was very reliable for fixing the occasional electrical problem or painting a wall, what have you. A very helpful employee to have. I don’t know what we’ll do without him. But I’m afraid I only spoke with him briefly, now and then, when there was a special little project I needed him to do, so I didn’t know him very well, nor did I know whether he was friendly with any of our other employees. The person who could help you with this is our director of personnel.”
The spate of information ended, like turning off a faucet. He beamed, seemingly pleased to be able to get rid of Emma in such a nice mannerly way. He even went so far as to shake her hand warmly before ushering her back into the hallway and shutting the door firmly behind her, not, she noticed, offering to walk her over to the personnel director’s office. She had the distinct feeling that she had been very politely thrown out of his office.
Emma shrugged and wandered down the hallway, peering at the brass plates by each of the doors, wondering if she was going to get rousted by a security guard. She saw the security cameras in the ceiling but she was frankly a little surprised that nonemployees were allowed to roam freely up here. Then she thought of her own office. If people off the street penetrated the upper levels of the building where she worked, who would try to stop them? There was always an unstated assumption that if you were there you were supposed to be there, unless you obviously weren’t, like the time the very drunk stripper had gotten the address wrong. Although Emma sometimes wondered about that.
Finally, she discovered the director of personnel around a corner, tucked away in a veritable closet of an office. A tiny wren of woman, she was unemotional and uninterested in what Emma wanted to know and why she wanted to know it, but gave an answer anyway as she tapped the keys on a calculator and made a note on a sheet of scratch paper, peering through silver-rimmed glasses as she did so.
“Mike Rafferty,” she said without looking up. “I know the two of them used to talk. Mike’s one of our night security guards. He comes on,” she glanced at her watch, “at about 4:30, just before the day guards get off duty. He gets off about midnight. Paul used to work the same shift.”
Emma, who wasn’t accustomed to human resources professionals who would talk about employees, however harmlessly, thanked her and, not daring to push her luck further, let her get back to calculating vacation days due, then made her way back down to the first floor. She found Grant in a spacious gallery staring at a very nice Manet, a perplexed expression on his face.
There were only a few other patrons in the room. Which meant what? She wished she’d paid more attention to what Paul had said about his work. A museum that couldn’t draw had a problem.
One of the patrons was obviously an art history student; she stared intently at the wall, then madly scribbled notes down on a pad of yellow paper. An older couple squabbled quietly near a Rodin sculpture and a jogger breathed heavily on a stone bench, evidently seeking shelter from the sun.
“Paul knew one of the security guards here,” Emma said to Grant, who didn’t turn to look at her. “He’ll be coming on later this afternoon. I’d like to talk to him.”
Grant nodded and continued his perplexed examination of the Manet. Emma felt that if he were going to be perplexed, he ought to be perplexed over one of Picasso’s Blue Period paintings, or a Dali surreal painting, not a nice little Impressionist daub. She shook her head and squinted at the Manet. Nothing.
Finally, Grant abandoned his perplexity and turned around to look at her. “You want to stick around here?” he asked. “I can come back for you later, say five o’clock.”
“I can get a cab.”
Paul would have snorted and said, Good luck with that. Grant said, “I don’t mind.”
Which was possibly an expression of sarcasm; Grant had always been more subtle than Paul. She suspected, though, that he was simply indulging her again. Well, let him.
“That’s fine,” she said, and then, hearing the echo of Grandmother’s many lessons, added a grudging, “Thank you.”
Grant gave the Manet a final look, then left, car keys jangling in his hand. She never did figure out what had puzzled him so much about the painting.
She took the opportunity to explore, heading over to the east wing, which showcased an exhibition of lovely art nouveau jewelry. As she bent over an intricately wrought necklace in one display case, she remembered leaning over another display case, a different one, containing the rosary bead Paul had wanted her to see all those years ago. Her heart skipped and a lance of pain grabbed her breath away for a minute. All that excitement and possibility, ended now.
She took a breath to steady herself. She wondered if this was one of the cases her brother had made, a thing he had left behind, real, solid, the product of his labor if not his heart. She reached out to trace the oak frame with her finger, then drew her hand back before touching it. Displays were usually wired and more than once in her life she’d accidentally set off an alarm, leaning too close, trying to see, to ingest, to experience.
She made herself take a step away to give a little distance and clasped her hands behind her back. Did Paul drive this nail? Had he planed that edge smooth? She thought about her grandfather showing him how to work with his hands. Grandfather would have been willing to teach her carpentry, too, but she didn’t have the patience for it. The only thing she’d ever had the patience for was painting. Not even the kind you could do as a trade, which Grandfather would have understood and approved.
At four-thirty, she reminded herself what she was here for, and tearing herself away from museum displays, went in search of Mike Rafferty. She found him patrolling — there was no other word for what he was doing — in an alcove just off the west wing, where some gorgeous textiles were being displayed.
The textiles nearly distracted her from her mission, but she exercised some self-discipline and turned away from them. She went up to the guard and introduced herself as Paul’s sister. “I understand you were a friend of his.”
Mike Rafferty grunted once, his eyes narrowing suspiciously as he looked her over, pausing in his patrolling to do so. He was a thickset man, probably once played on the high school football team, hadn’t been recruited by a college and had never figured out what to do next. His life having already happened, he wore an expression of perpetual dissatisfaction at how it had turned out. She could tell it was perpetual by how deeply it was engraved on his face. He seemed to be in his late thirties and his uniform wasn’t quite as clean as it could have been or as neatly pressed as possible. His black leather shoes shone, however. She understood: Discipline rarely failed all at once in a spectacular collapse.
Mike seemed a very unlikely friend for Paul. He didn’t seem to have any of the warmth or humor or spirit Paul’s friends usually possessed. They might sometimes be characterized as unfocused and lazy, perhaps, but they were generous and funny.
“I wanted to meet some of the people he knew,” Emma said, when he didn’t respond to her initial foray.
Mike fixed her with a baleful look. “Why?” he asked.
I want to know why he had to die. Not something she could say out loud to a stranger without sounding nuts. “It makes me feel closer to him.”
Mike’s unwelcoming expression didn’t change. “Uh-huh. How come I never saw you around before now?”
Emma flinched. Seeing that, a thin satisfied smile crossed his face and he pressed harder. “How do I even know you’re really his sister?” he asked aggressively. “You could be anyone.”
That was too much. “Who else would care?” she snapped. “Look, Mike, there was something strange about his death. I don’t think it was an accident, okay? So I was thinking that maybe some of his friends could help me understand what happened.”
Mike’s face went white. His posture, which had been stiff before, turned positively rigid. “Like what?” he asked, his voice a rasping growl.
As quickly as it had come, the anger washed out of her. “I have one friend who thinks he was depressed, maybe suicidal,” she said, watching his face slowly. “Does that sound like Paul?” she asked. As painful as it was to think of Paul suicidal, she didn’t want to start with the even harder questions: Was he still clean? Had he ever been?
Mike shifted, his eyes darting around the room as if to make sure no one was eavesdropping. For a moment she thought, hoped, he might be getting ready to say something important, something he wouldn’t want anyone to overhear. But in the end, he shrugged. “I don’t know. Look, I hardly knew the guy.” His eyes moved ceaselessly. Maybe he was just doing his job. “We just, you know, talked about the ball games.”
That was going to be it. If there’d been an approach that would have worked, she hadn’t found it.
“Did anyone else talk to him much?” she asked, a bubble of desperation building in her chest. Maybe there’d was someone else, someone more cooperative that she could talk to. Someone who knew Paul and would reassure her that there was no mystery about his death. It was just a thing that happened. Bad things sometimes did.
“Look, lady,” Mike said, taking a step away from her. “I got to work, okay?”
She understood perfectly. “Yeah. Okay.” She turned and walked back down the hall, this time not seeing any of the art on the walls. Then she was out of the building, into the bright afternoon, the heat sucking the air out of her lungs, disorienting after hours in the cool, dim interior of the museum.
Grant was waiting for her in the parking lot, just as he’d promised. Maybe she would deal with him better if he weren’t so reliable. People who could be counted on used their steadfastness like a weapon.
She climbed into the car, the throb in her injured arm reminding her that it had been a few hours since the last pain pill and not long enough since she’d confronted the crazy thin man in Linda’s apartment. The memory made her stomach twist. She leaned her head back against the seat and closed her eyes.
Into the silence, Grant asked, “Did he tell you anything?”
She rolled her head over to look at him, too tired to even lift it from the headrest. “Not much. He didn’t want to talk to me.”
A corner of Grant’s mouth quirked up as he backed the car out of the parking space. “That makes him a suspicious person?”
“I didn’t say he was a suspicious person,” she said. Then, because she did think he was, added, “Most people like talking.”
“Some people don’t.”
There didn’t seem to be anything to say to that, so she didn’t, just turned her head the other way and looked out the window at the buildings flashing by.
Grant dropped her at the door to her hotel, apparently feeling he’d indulged her enough for one day. That was fine with Emma, who gave him a brusque thank you and an equally brusque goodbye. She started across the threadbare carpet in the lobby, then stopped suddenly, like walking into a glass wall, her attention arrested by the thin man standing by the front desk. He was asking the desk clerk a question she couldn’t hear. Without pausing to consider the action, Emma strode over to the thin man, grabbed his shoulder, and said, “What in hell are you doing here?”
It took a moment for the facts to overtake her anger at his audacity: he’d shot her and she should be afraid of him. She wasn’t, though. She was frustrated, upset and annoyed, not to mention mad at Detective Witherspoon about not keeping him locked up for shooting her.
The thin man swung around, trembling, his face sallow and ugly. His pale blue eyes focused on Emma and his expression changed as he recognized who she was. The desk clerk watched them, his gaze ping-ponging from one face to the other. The front desk phone rang and he leaned over to answer it, but his eyes never left their faces. A man who could see trouble coming.
“I was just trying to find out what room you were in,” Linda’s boyfriend said to her. “I wanted to talk to you. They let me go, the police, I mean, I had an alibi, but I think they’re watching me.” His eyes darted around the lobby, as if trying to spot a plainclothes detective. Emma hoped someone was watching him. Someone needed to.
“Get away from me,” she said through her teeth. “I don’t know why they let you go, you should be in jail for what you did to me — ”
“I didn’t mean it!” he interrupted, his voice shaking, like he was more nervous than she was. “I’m sorry, you scared me! Maybe you could tell them it’s okay?”
“Tell them it’s okay?” she exclaimed. “You think you were scared? What about me? Maybe you should think before you start shooting at people. You could have killed me.” She stopped before she could say the way you killed Linda but he must have heard that in her voice because he said, “I didn’t hurt her. I would never have hurt her. I was bringing her the gun so she could be safe.”
There was a silence after that. He stared at Emma, as if willing her to reassure him that she believed what he said. When she didn’t immediately do so, he repeated himself. “I didn’t hurt her.” He lowered his eyes until he seemed to be addressing the carpet, mumbling in a low voice so it was hard for her to hear him unless she listened carefully.
Listen to me, Emma.
Paul, I have to go. I don’t have time for this. She might as well have said, I don’t have time for you.
“I would never have hurt Linda,” he said again. Emma couldn’t decide if the repetition made him more believable or less. “She was scared, what I mean is she’d been scared for weeks, even before he died. Paul. I was worried about her. I asked her to tell me what was wrong. She wouldn’t. She wouldn’t say what or who or why. Do you know?”
Her injured shoulder throbbed and she cupped it with her hand. Why was she standing here listening to him? For all she knew, he was a murderer. A murderer who wanted to talk to her.
“What’s your name?” she asked. “The police detective told me but I can’t remember.”
“Alfred,” he said, lifting his head from his perusal of the carpet. He extended his hand, and she found herself shaking hands with the man who had just shot her. Clearly, Los Angeles was meant to be a learning experience for her. “Alfred Kent.” He lowered his eyes again. “I was Linda’s boyfriend until she started seeing Paul and I was going to be her boyfriend after he was through with her but I didn’t like it. That was your brother, wasn’t it? Boy, was I mad, it hurt my feelings.” His whole body clenched and then he looked up at Emma and said, “But I would never hurt her, you know, I said we could be friends and that’s what I meant, but she was afraid and so I went to see her. I was going to ask her one more time. I thought maybe I could protect her. That’s why I had the gun, I knew she was scared.”
The flood ended and Alfred flicked another look at her face. “Uh-huh,” was all Emma could think of to say. No wonder Detective Witherspoon had let him go. He probably got tired of listening to him. And, Emma had to admit, for an armed assailant, he seemed pretty harmless.
The automatic doors whooshed open and a squat woman wearing a turban and carrying two pieces of tapestry luggage breezed in and marched directly to the front desk. Had she ever stood in a hotel lobby talking with her attacker? Emma somehow doubted it.
“I never hurt her,” Alfred said yet again. His hands were dancing in the air and his toe was tapping on the ground.
Emma asked, “Why were you looking for me?”
Alfred gave her a blank look as if he didn’t know what she was talking about. His pale blue eyes unfocused for a moment and then he looked at her again and said, “Oh, yes, I wanted to tell you that I — ”
“Never hurt her,” she finished for him. “Okay. I believe you.” What did it hurt?
“She was afraid,” he said again, in case she hadn’t heard him the first several times. Then he said clearly, lucidly, “I want to find out why. I want to find out who she was afraid of and why. And I thought that maybe you were trying to find the same thing out about her — about your brother.”
Emma nodded, not speaking, finding it hard to believe that she and Alfred could have any goal in common and not wanting to encourage him in thinking they were on the same side. He didn’t seem to notice that she wasn’t saying much; he had enough words for both of them.
“It was all right at the beginning, you know. Before she got that job, everything was all right and she wasn’t afraid of anything, but she wanted more, you know. She thought there was a bigger life out there somewhere.” He made a vague gesture with his dancing hands. “Sometimes I wish she never got that job.”
“What job?”
His hands stopped for a moment and he gave her a puzzled look, as if processing her question took all of his energy and attention. “At the museum,” he said. “She was the secretary there, to the director, I guess. It’s a pretty nice place. That’s how she met him. Paul I mean.” His hands started their dance again. “I wish she’d never gotten a job there, then she wouldn’t have met him and she wouldn’t have left me and she wouldn’t be dead.”
It was a succinct and logical chain of reasoning and there was no part of it that Emma could deny or counter.
Now he was crying. He was just standing there on the carpet in the lobby of a cut-rate LA hotel, crying. He didn’t care who saw.
After a while, she asked him if he was going to be all right and he said he’d never be all right again and, did she think she would ever find out what happened and she said I hope so. Then she said goodbye to him, and left him standing there looking at his toe tapping on the carpet, his hands dancing in the air.