That night Red Eye and I went for a drive in the hills of Oakland. Life always looked different from up there. I’d had a taste of hills life in my house but I didn’t have a view. A view would have cost me another $100,000. It didn’t seem worth it at the time, but now I understood. My neighbors with those enormous tinted windows overlooking San Francisco Bay saw the same world as Jeffcoat from the fourteenth floor. I hadn’t quite gotten over my encounter with him. Even with all my experience, I just wasn’t sure I could out-con a millionaire on his own turf. I came from a different planet.
When I wasn’t in juvie, I grew up in neighborhoods where the only view I had was peeping in on what the family next door was up to. What I couldn’t see, I heard through open windows or thin walls. There was life in those streets, though, and on the playgrounds. Nowadays they’d probably call the families in my old neighborhoods “dysfunctional.” Definitely two or three of the foster homes where I ended up fell in that category. Going to juvenile hall and then the penitentiary didn’t help. Everyone knew your habits there. If you used an extra square of toilet paper, half a dozen guys would ask you if you had diarrhea. The hills had none of that openness. Everyone’s life in Carltonville was a closed circle. Too much time to worry over nothing.
Red Eye halted the car in one of those places where you could see from San Francisco all the way down to San Jose. We wanted to get out of the car to take a fresh look. I waited while Red Eye put on a long-sleeve shirt. In this neck of the woods, he never showed off his montage of ink spider webs, dragon heads, prison bars, and the little graveyard with the RIPs for his fallen friends. If people in Carltonville saw all that, they might jump to dangerous conclusions.
“Just when I buy a house and get out of the ghetto,” I complained, “a woman turns up dead in my pool. I wasn’t meant to have any peace in life. The curse of the harelip.”
“Trouble follows us,” said Red Eye. “We can move up the hill but we’ll always be foreigners here. Our past is only a few miles away. It can climb up here and find us any time.”
“I’ve thought of moving to Hawaii,” I said.
“We can’t let go, don’t know how to leave it alone. It’s just like in the pen. Someone steps on your foot and doesn’t say ‘excuse me.’ Another guy burns you for a few soups. Just a couple of bucks. But you have to retaliate. You know it’s petty but you can’t leave it alone.”
“This isn’t petty,” I said. “It’s a murder.”
“One we should leave alone. It will only bring us more trouble.”
“You’re right, we should just forget about it, get on with our lives.”
“But we won’t, will we?”
“Hell, no. It’s just not our nature,” I replied, “just so we’re on the same page.”
“We’re on the same paragraph,” said Red Eye.
Before we’d left my house, Red Eye had rolled two joints and tucked them into his pack of Camels. Even with the weed I hadn’t relaxed since Prudence’s death, except for that one time with Olga. That really didn’t count.
As we got back in the car, Red Eye put on the Eagles’ “Lyin’ Eyes.”
The lyrics highlighted my situation. But whose eyes were lyin’? Was it Jeffcoat’s or Newman’s? Was it Prudence’s? Her eyes were lying from day one. She didn’t come from London. English wasn’t even her first language. And she had a family she never talked about. Lots of lies. But they never bothered me that much. Some people had to lie to survive. All my years of bringing people across the border taught me that.
My worry was that the real lyin’ eyes might be my own. I’d have to check the next time I looked in the mirror. Was I lying to myself thinking I could solve this? After all, I’d made so many bad decisions in my life, how could I be sure this wasn’t just another one? But I knew one thing. Finding Prudence’s killer was the right thing to do. I just had to stop thinking about all this other stuff and go and track down Peter Margolis. That’s what would turn this case around.