16

Joe’s place was a separate building behind a big house in the Hollywood Hills—what real estate people used to call a “mother-in-law unit.” Justine had always hated that name. The current jargon term “accessory dwelling unit” was no more elegant and less human. She liked the term “guesthouse.” Both buildings were painted the same creamy off-white.

The guesthouse was about sixty feet from the main house and about forty from the five-car garage, which was cloaked in magenta bougainvillea vines. Two mature California oaks shaded the guesthouse and the back part of the main house. As Joe’s car reached the upper end of the driveway, she could see that the backyard was a garden full of well-tended greenery.

He opened one of the garage doors with a remote control, coasted into the empty space, and pressed the remote to close the door behind them. She liked that, because if Ben’s killer had seen Joe’s car, he didn’t see it now. She happened to be looking at Joe in profile as he turned off the engine. He noticed and said, “It keeps the car from getting hot. The midday sun can be brutal.”

“I live in LA,” she said. “I like shade too.”

“I meant that I’m not putting the car away, really. I can take you wherever and whenever you want.”

“I wasn’t worried,” she said. “I believed you before. What’s your last name, by the way?”

“Alston.” He didn’t ask hers.

She followed him out a side door of the garage to a flagstone path that led to the guesthouse, which he used a key on his keychain to open. It was one of a dozen tiny indications that he was who he said he was and had a right to be here. She stepped in and looked around. There was a rectangular sunlit living room that evolved into an office as she moved down the length of it, past some nice gray furniture arranged in a conversational grouping to a space with a large desk and matching filing cabinet with a printer on it.

She could see a short hallway with one door on either side that had to be a bedroom. Across the living room was a rudimentary kitchen that consisted of a wall of counter space and cabinets interrupted by a refrigerator, a small electric stove top with a ventilation hood above it, a dishwasher, and a single sink. She said, “It’s a pretty, cheerful space.”

“Thank you.”

“Who lives in the big house?”

“A friend who rents me this pretty, cheerful space.”

“What’s her name?”

“His name is James. The reason he has the big house is that he’s the executive producer of Sacajawea. The reason he’s seldom in it is that he’s the executive producer of Sacajawea, which is shot in Canada. Before that it was Doctor Frank, which was shot in an old decommissioned hospital and soundstages in LA. Even then he wasn’t hanging around much because he worked such long hours.”

She said, “So you just keep an eye on his place, walk his dog, and make sure nobody but you sleeps with his wife?”

“No dog,” he said. “And no wife right now either, probably because he worked too much to spend time with her.”

“Too bad. And this is the place where you work?”

“I do the real writing here, but part of the time I’m out doing research, taking pictures, and doing interviews.”

“Articles, then. And who buys them?”

“You sound like my mother.”

“You’re evading her question.”

“Magazines, newspapers, and syndicates, some of them online. And anything I don’t sell I publish on my blog.”

“Can you earn a living that way?”

“I get by.”

“How?”

“You know the ant and the grasshopper?”

“Not personally.”

“Aesop’s fables. The grasshopper fools around all summer and dies when the winter comes. The ant works hard, saves part of whatever ants get paid by their editors, and thrives.”

“He’s still an ant, though.”

“True.”

“Well, I’ll stop bothering you and let you get to work. I need to check my phones.”

“I wondered about that. Why do you have two phones?”

It seemed fair to her that he was retaliating for her prying questions, but she tried to end it. “One work and one life.” It was not quite a lie. The police had held the work phone she’d had the night of the shooting, but when she’d gone home to collect her things, she’d reactivated an older work phone because the numbers and information it held were still valid.

Joe Alston recognized that she had accidentally given him an invitation to ask about her work, but he made a decision not to use it. He sat at his desk and took a laptop computer out of the deep drawer on the right and opened it. She was relieved that he really did have work to do. She had bought herself some time in a place where her killer would never look for her. She could stop and think of a way to help get Ben’s killer caught.

She walked to the conversation area where the furniture was, took her charger out of her purse, plugged it into the wall to charge her main phone, and sat on a couch nearby. It had occurred to her that she had little reason anymore to have two phones, but the old work phone had possibly crucial information on it and she had to keep its battery charged. She went to the wall and exchanged the phones.

She took another look at the pictures of the man who had been standing in the garage at Spengler-Nash. Then she looked at the pictures she had taken of the man driving the BMW. She was sure she had been right that they were the same man. She decided to see if he had turned up in any other pictures without her recognizing him.

This morning she had taken a few shots while she rode the shuttle bus, while she waited in line for the taxi, and then a few through the rear window of the cab. She had taken a few more in the coffee shop while she had been pretending to read her email. And there, among the people at tables, was Joe Alston, surreptitiously looking in her direction.

Justine wasn’t sure why she was doing what she was about to do. She wasn’t afraid of him or anything, but she had decided to look him up. She found he wrote under his own name, Joseph Alston, which made him seem more adult and legitimate to her, so she tapped a link.

The first article she found was from a month ago. It seemed at first to be just another of the innumerable articles about depressing failures of the city government. A group of local business owners and CEOs had begun trying to make a practical plan to build water storage systems and make possible reuse of water. Since they, together, employed a large number of engineers and architects and owned heavy equipment, they had made a good start. It was a good article.

She scanned another one. It was about unions and the recent attempts to organize fields that had never had unions before. She had begun to read with skepticism. Spengler-Nash had never had a union and for all of her time there she had received constant training, steadily rising pay, and friendly working conditions among people prepared to risk their lives for her. But as she read some of Joseph Alston’s interviews with employees in other specialized industries, she began to recognize some of the complaints. While Ben was alive everyone loved and trusted him and he treated them well. But before his body was cold, his brother and sister had come in and obliterated Justine’s working life and made her more vulnerable to Ben’s killer and to criminal charges. A union might have been able to help her in a number of ways. It was another good article.

She began to feel guilty about Joe Alston. She had correctly assessed him in several ways—a heterosexual on his own and therefore susceptible to manipulation by a young woman; a decent guy, and therefore not likely to refuse a favor, steal her jacket, or make a scene. She’d guessed he was some kind of freelancer and therefore someone with time for her to waste. She had used him to make sure that when her killer looked in the coffee shop windows, he wouldn’t find her.

She regretted that she had put him in danger—or really, drawn him into her danger. It was an unfair thing to do even in a moment of extreme need. Still, thanks to her selfish moves, they were both here in this secret place. He seemed to be doing his work, which was all he’d wanted. And every minute she wasn’t out on the street showing her face was a minute when her killer was wasting his time and energy, getting tired and frustrated and learning nothing.

About fifteen feet away Joe Alston was looking at his computer screen. On it was a photograph of Justine Poole, the professional bodyguard who had won a shoot-out against five armed robbers, killed one—no, now it was two because the surgery hadn’t saved the wounded one—and blocked the escape of the others and gotten them arrested.

He had just written the last lines of a draft of his article about a group of unscrupulous real estate lawyers. They had been using some recent well-meaning but foolish legislation that had outlawed local zoning. His article followed several projects sure to transform residential neighborhoods into overcrowded, overheated slums with great profits to developers. His first draft had most of what he needed, but the evidence he had collected wasn’t going to disappear. If anything, it would grow fuller and stronger in the time it would take him to explore another topic.

This Justine Poole story was impossible to ignore. Reporters were already calling her a hero. Every journalist in the city was looking for her, hoping for an interview, even some small part of her story that would rate a byline or a one-minute report in front of a camera. And Justine Poole was sitting on his couch, no more than fifteen feet away.