CHAPTER FIVE

“I was having drinks in the hotel bar with the congressman. The girl was there with a friend, sitting at a table not far from ours. One thing led to another.”

“It was just the two of you?” I asked. “You and the congressman?”

Valden’s feet were twitching as he crossed and recrossed his legs. His eyes were all over the room, sliding across the gallery of cops’ faces that stared out from the walls.

I stood and went behind the bar. I unlocked the cabinet with a key from the ring that had let us in, and pulled out a bottle of Chivas. I poured three fingers in a glass for my brother and brought it to him.

“You need to try and calm down,” I said.

The glass trembled as he brought it to his lips. Valden closed his eyes as he took a long swallow, gave me a curt nod and looked back to the floor.

“Congressman Kelleher . . .” I prompted him.

“Yes,” he said again. “It was just the two of us.”

“How many other people in the bar?”

He glanced up at the ceiling, blinked several times.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Twenty, thirty?”

“Anybody you know? Anybody seem to know you? Or the congressman?”

“It was pretty quiet. We were in the back, at a table in the corner. And no. Nobody seemed to give us a second glance. It’s LA.”

“What about Kelleher?”

My brother picked up the Chivas again, looked into it for the answer.

“He crapped out early.”

“But you didn’t.”

Valden slammed the tumbler down hard. Scotch spilled over the rim and onto the table. His outburst didn’t impress me.

“Don’t be a hypocrite, Mike.” His laugh was dry, brittle.

I crossed over to the bar again, grabbed a roll of paper towels, came back and tossed them on the table. They landed in the tawny pool that had begun to drip onto the floor tiles.

“She a pro, Valden?”

“What the hell difference does that make?” he said, pushing the Scotch-soaked napkins away.

“Talk to me, goddamn it,” I said. “It’s important. Was she a pro?”

It was an old story. Men such as my brother tend to screw down, marry up, and think they get to make the rules.

He brought the Chivas to his lips, tipped away the last of it as he absorbed the images on the aging portraits along the wall. He stared at them for a long minute before he shook his head.

“It’s all so simple for you guys, isn’t it?”

I didn’t answer, dragged a chair across the floor and took a seat across from him.

Valden poured himself another three fingers and threw it back in one smooth motion. I watched the whiskey smolder at the back of his throat and saw the liquid glaze wash across his eyes.

“Everything’s all spelled out for you,” he said. “Your uniforms, your chain of command, your rules.” He turned and looked me in the face. “The real world doesn’t work like that. You have no idea what real life is like.”

I smiled sadly at what my brother had become. I let the irony hang there in that tired room, surrounded by the portraits of cops who had been killed for nothing other than doing their jobs.

“I’m not your judge, Valden.” That inclination, if it had ever existed at all, had been hacked away, piece by piece, over years of prevarication and mistrust. You had to have a stake in something to be a judge of it. All we shared now was a name and a secret. I had agreed to help him solely out of a sense of obligation to our family.

“I need to know, Valden. I need to know where to look.” I asked again: “Was she a pro?”

The tumbler bounced noisily as his open hand came smashing down on the table. He stood suddenly, sent his chair crashing into the scarred wainscot.

“Fuck you, Mike,” he said.

Valden dropped me at the Alamo lot near LAX. There were people I wanted to meet with, and I needed to get around on my own. My brother offered me the use of his car and driver, but a limo was not my speed, nor was being spied on by a curious chauffeur. I told him I’d get in touch after I’d had a chance to talk to some friends of mine, and had a little time to think things through. I knew he’d spend the rest of the morning pacing his suite, maybe pick up where he’d left off with the Chivas.

I watched the limo’s brake lights flash as it bullied its way into the flow of traffic, feeling something approaching pity crop up inside me. My brother had spent his life in the pursuit of the premise of success. He desired the trappings, the illusion and the rush. But that was all it had become. Wealth and status had become ends in and of themselves, solipsistic victories in an endless war that raged inside his head. And like any addict, he danced closer to the flame of self-destruction every day of his life. The greatest irony of all was that the willful use of the power he craved was the very source of the slow ruin he was courting so blithely.

I know now that hindsight looks through a misshapen glass, affords a view that is not as accurate as we would wish to believe. Most often, it only shows us what might have been, what we wish had been, but was not. Perhaps I was as much in need of absolution as he was.

The initia call I made was to Vonda Franklin, an old friend from the crime lab, and the only person I knew with the expertise to help me with the first part of the problem.

I called her office, but she wasn’t in. I found her home number, still filed away in the old-school address book I keep in my briefcase, and woke her up. After a predictable outpouring of bitching and moaning, she gave me the address of a coffee shop not far from where she lived, and told me to meet her in an hour.

The place smelled of old coffee, burned toast and disillusionment. Two young women, newly minted junkies, amateur whores, or both, shared a newspaper at the counter, where a dull-eyed waitress sucked a breath mint and leaned idly against the pass-through. In back, a tired Hispanic cook wiped kitchen grease off his cheek with the back of his hand.

I took a seat in the back, at a table that faced the door, and waited.

Vonda showed up fifteen minutes late, which had given me time to write some things down. I think best when I think on paper.

She pulled up a chair and glanced around the place. “Not how I remember it,” she said, shaking her head. “I swear to God, this neighborhood’s going straight into the shitter right before my eyes.”

I leaned over and kissed her cheek.

“Not exactly paradise, eh, Mike?”

“Never was,” I said.

She pulled some reading glasses from her purse and put them on the table beside her. “So, how’s my favorite white man?”

I smiled. It was an old routine.

“You look tired,” she said. Vonda reached over, placed a soft brown hand on top of mine and patted me. “And a little wound up?”

“This thing has a short timeline.”

“Then let’s get to it,” she said, tossing a glance over her shoulder toward the kitchen.

The waitress came around from behind the counter, boredom and indolence defining everything about her. Vonda ordered coffee and whole wheat toast. I asked for hot water and a bag of tea. The waitress rolled her eyes and turned away in a draft of stale nicotine.

I slid my notepad into the light where I could read it.

“I see you still make your little doodley notes,” she said.

I tilted it toward her, showed her the jumble of words, the lines and twisted angles, the geometric shapes and odd patterns that reflected the inner pattern of my thoughts. Vonda always had found them amusing.

The waitress came back and tossed our order onto the table.

I told Vonda about the blackmail scheme, the DVD, and the threat to post the video to the Internet. I didn’t tell her we were talking about my brother.

“Clever,” she said, spreading strawberry jam on a slice of toast. “You’ve got the disk?”

“Yes.”

“Got it with you?”

I nodded.

“Let me see it,” she said.

I dipped into my briefcase and came out with it.

She slid it carefully from the sleeve, touching only the outer edges and examined it in the light. A rainbow of refracted light swirled across the silver surface and caught the attention of the women at the counter, who turned to watch for a moment before rapidly losing interest.

“That’s one thing, at least,” she said.

“What is?”

“It’s not commercially reproduced. At least this one wasn’t.”

“Which means?”

She took the glasses from her nose and looked at me, amber eyes direct and clear.

“It was burned onto a type of disk that’s made for consumer use. If it had been mass produced, I’d be able to tell.”

“Then there aren’t many copies floating around,” I said.

“Probably not. This was likely done on a low-volume burner. Like something you’d use at home.”

“Or to back up a security system,” I said.

“Given what you told me about the hotel, could be a good guess.”

“You said something about low volume. How do you know?”

“You’d have to go to a different kind of disk, a whole different process to mass-produce them.”

She slipped the disk into its sleeve and handed it back to me.

“Any way to identify who made the copy?”

“Not exactly,” she said. “But you can tell which machine did the copy.”

I pushed my cup away, leaned forward on my elbows. I looked past Vonda’s shoulder and winked at the two eavesdropping hookers. They turned away.

“How?”

Vonda smiled.

“Little known fact, Travis: every digital burner has a machine-specific alphanumeric code that marks everything it does. A small concession to the software industry to protect against piracy.”

“A signature,” I said.

“Better,” she nodded. “More like a fingerprint. Completely unique.”

“We’d need something to match it to,” I said.

“That’s true,” she said. “Or you could run the numeric code by all the hardware manufacturers and try to trace the machine; who made it, who sold it, who bought it.”

“It’s Saturday,” I said. “I need the information before noon tomorrow.”

“Then you’re going to have to identify the people who burned that disk.”

We both went silent when the waitress brought the check.

“One more thing, Vonda,” I said. “What about posting it on the Internet?”

“Short version?”

“Please.”

She told me about IP addresses, about data packets and protocols, domain names and dedicated servers, but my mind was drifting elsewhere, even as I made notes in my little book.

I watched a young mother in a Nirvana T-shirt briefly struggle with the glass door while she balanced a baby on her hip, a row of silver studs marking the outline of her ear. Her eyes were washed out and gray, like she had spent the better part of her life in tears.

I thought of the Kehau, floating in a bay halfway across the Pacific; and of Lani, sitting alone with her first cup of coffee, where the sun was only now showing itself from behind the thin layer of cloud cover that cloaked the early morning shoulders of Hualalai.

“You still with me?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Thing is, Travis,” Vonda went on, “to have their scheme work, they’d have to have a domain name ready to go. You know, a way to drive folks to the site once it was up and running. Something like Blackmailers.com or DouchebagsandThieves.net, you get the idea. Whatever the domain name is has to be registered to somebody.”

“They already have one. How long would it take to track the name of the owner?”

“If it was done legit, not long at all. But if they’re smart, it’d be hidden deep inside a series of shells, like a set of Russian nesting dolls.”

“How long?”

“A long time, but I’m just LA police.” She shrugged. “The Feds, though? That’d be something else altogether.”

I put down my pen on top of the notepad and pushed them away. My eyes drifted out the window past the parking lot and onto the flow of traffic in the street beyond.

“I haven’t been much help,” Vonda said.

“You’ve helped plenty.”

Tiny lines fanned from the corners of her eyes as she showed me a sad smile. “You look like you have a hundred people inside your head.”

I squinted as a stray glint of sunlight glanced off the windshield of a passing car and into my eyes. I turned to face her.

I had been engaged for the greater part of my adult life in an attempt to negotiate an ocean that had no definition, no shape, no markers or boundaries, no plumb line to gauge its depth. I had bartered away the quiescence of discovery in exchange for an aptitude for navigation.

“I’m considering marriage for the first time in my life,” I said. “Lani and me.”

She was silent for several seconds as the smile reached her eyes.

“That’s a beautiful thing, Mike.”

“I don’t know why I told you that,” I admitted. “I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“You’re happy?”

“When I’m with her, I’m home.”

Vonda reached across the table and touched my fingers with the tips of hers.

“You ever miss LA? You used to like this town once.”

“I used to love it.”

She averted her eyes and a heavy silence hung between us for long seconds.

I thanked her then, slid a ten under the napkin dispenser and we slipped out of the booth.

Fifteen minutes later, I watched Vonda’s car ease out of the lot, her arm hanging casually out the driver’s side window. She tossed me a little wave, gave two taps on the horn, and melted into the city.