As Kate entered her condo, its serenity and coolness, the tree-shaded muted light, fell over her like an embrace. Even with all the changes she’d so recently made the place was so utterly and gratifyingly hers that she momentarily regretted her offer to house Jean Velez and her son. No one besides Aimee had ever stayed here and she felt vague apprehension that somehow this mother and son might imprint themselves and alter the atmosphere that had become almost spiritual to her over the years. She could not imagine ever selling this place, she realized. She could not imagine ever living anywhere else.
“Nice,” Jean Velez said, looking around, setting down a suitcase.
“Wow,” said Jason, depositing his knapsack. “Do we get to stay here, Mom?”
“For a while, honey,” Jean said, ruffling the boy’s thick, dark hair. “Only if you do your part to prove to Kate we’ll take very good care of her place.”
On the drive to Los Angeles Kate had begun to modify her opinion of Jean Velez. Picking up the 10 Freeway out of Yucca Valley west of Palm Springs made for a longer drive back to LA through heavy traffic but Kate had felt little awkwardness during her two and a half hours with mother and son; Jean had sat in the backseat playing games with her son, doing her best to keep his hyperkinetic activity and occasional screams of triumph tamped down: “Cool it, honey, Kate needs to concentrate on driving.”
And she had needed to concentrate, especially on the changing array of traffic in the rearview mirror, until she was completely certain that Jack Cameron had not somehow concealed himself near the cabin and identified her car and its occupants and was following them.
“I won’t be here nights so you can have the master bedroom,” Kate told Jean. “Everything’s in walking distance, grocery stores, lots of places Jason might like. You bring the rest of the stuff up from the car, I’ll stay here with him and change the sheets on the bed.”
“You need to go,” Jean said firmly, grabbing Jason by the tail of his Big Bird T-shirt as he was about set off to explore the rest of the condo. “If all three of us unpack the car, I can change the sheets. You have things to do and you need to get to them.”
Kate nodded. The preparations for leaving the cabin had taxed her to her very last molecule of patience. First had come the necessity for each adult to offer persuasion that it was a very good thing for Jason to come to West Hollywood where he could look for movie and TV stars. He absorbed all these assurances, his guileless eyes switching uncertainly from Kate to his uncle to his mother, fearfully studying all three adults coaxing him, before finally voicing a doubtful, “Okay, I guess.” Packing up what mother and especially her needful son demanded he had to have for an indeterminate time at the condo—which meant everything—had taken more time. Then more reassurances from Jean into the renewed resistance of her son as to why he had to get into a stranger’s car when their own car was there, he pointed, right there. Combining this with the drive back, the day had devolved into late afternoon and her nerves felt stretched to snapping, especially when she could not have a drink. She still had to see Maggie, then return to Yucca Valley.
She and Cameron were in agreement that she would stay dusk to dawn at the cabin and as much of the day as possible. It took little intuition or skill to extrapolate years of wrathful planning in a prison cell to implementation of what would be a well-coordinated attack. Without doubt he would launch it in darkness. Not just for concealment but to allow ease of approach, few if any witnesses, and more time to inflict the most vicious and primitive terror Jack Cameron could devise as vengeance for what he viewed as years of incarceration at the hands of his family.
On the drive, finally assured that she wasn’t being followed, she had totaled up a few more facts and suppositions. Jack would have left prison prohibited from ever driving a car or ever owning a gun. He would have funds consisting only of minimal wages he may have earned in prison shops over the years plus the small allowance when he was released. None of these limitations would stop him. He would immediately steal a vehicle, and no one knew better than she did that his prison associates would tell him where he could easily and cheaply get a gun. He could and would rob for any money he needed and probably had, since he’d neither taken nor searched for anything of value from Joe’s place. He had already committed a felony by breaking into and damaging his brother’s house—if he had not worn gloves his fingerprints would be everywhere. He was a man with a broken life. A disastrous past, no present, no future. He was a man with nothing to lose. Like me, she thought.
Although she had not yet been able to voice the opinion to Cameron, it was her belief that Jack Cameron, his plan already in place, would be coming after his family sooner rather than later. The destruction in Joe’s house depicted a man possessed of far more fury than patience. He was probably already in the high desert, and the strike would quite likely be tonight. If he felt more need to reconnoiter the cabin, then tomorrow night. There was no rationale, no tactic in waiting. He was coming after his family, they knew it, and he knew they knew it.
She would do a daily commute, here to spend time with Maggie, then back to the cabin to keep watch with Cameron.
Jean had not changed the scant clothing she wore at the cabin, and now, as she sashayed down the third-floor hallway in her short shorts and cowboy boots, Kate was amused by the glances cast at her by Ramon and Ernesto who were waiting for the elevator, Ramon visibly wrinkling his nose as her floral perfume arrived in advance of her. Jean Velez would find limited interest in her wares here in Boystown. Kate’s neighbors grinned at Jason, Ernesto’s elbow-flapping imitation of Big Bird on Jason’s shirt making him laugh.
“I know we got off to a rocky start, I’ve been a real bitch,” Jean told Kate in the slow-moving elevator, oblivious to the witnesses to the conversation. “What you’re doing for our family—I owe you big time.”
Remembering Alice’s avowals of “I owe you, Miss Police Detective,” Kate smiled.
“Joe doesn’t deserve what our fucked-up brother’s done to his life,” Jean said.
“None of you do,” Kate said.
Jean shrugged that off, saying, “Joe’s the best of us. The best brother anyone could want.”
“I can say the same about him as a friend,” Kate said as the elevator doors opened on the first floor.
Jason said to Kate, “Do you have a gun in your pants too, like my Uncle Joe?”
Without missing a beat Ernesto answered, “Sure, kid,” as he and Ramon got out of the elevator on the first floor. “Everybody does.” He winked at Kate. “They call this the Wild West Hollywood.”
Smiling as she pushed the button for the garage, Kate asked Jason, “What would you think if I did?”
“I’d be glad,” he said somberly. “To keep us safe.”
“People don’t need guns to be safe,” she said with confidence, wanting it to be true. “Nothing will happen, Jason, I promise. Your mom, your uncle—we’ll all keep you safe.”
“I’ll be so glad when this is over,” Jean said, sliding an arm around Jason’s shoulders. “Whatever happens.”
Kate kept her silence. Depending on what happened when Jack Cameron tracked down his brother and how out of control events might spin, this might not be over for a long time. If ever.
With all three of them carrying boxes of Jason’s games and plastic bags holding their other possessions, they emptied Kate’s car in one trip.
The condo phone began ringing as they made their way back in the door. With a frisson of alarm Kate saw that it was Silverlake Haven. She dropped her bags and moved quickly to pick it up.
“Kate,” Marla said.
And Kate knew.
She flashed back to her visit with Maggie, Maggie asking for a pen, Maggie’s embrace, her whisper, “I love you, my dear friend.” Every sense she had ever developed as a detective, her every intuition about Maggie, were raising hairs on the back of her neck.
“I’m so sorry,” Marla whispered.
“Did you reach Aimee Grant?”
“I called you first.”
Kate glanced at her watch. Aimee would have just left work. “You’ll need to call her cell. I’m on my way.”
Kate slammed down the phone, grabbed her car keys and ran to the door shouting at Jean, “I have to go.”
She did not wait for the elevator, instead racing headlong down the stairs. Wrenching open the door she leaped into her car.
Kate sped heedlessly toward Silverlake Haven, weaving around traffic, wishing she had the flashing rear window light she’d once been able to activate that scattered cars from her path as she commandeered her way through the city in an otherwise unmarked police vehicle. She cut off an oncoming car, its brakes screeching, to pull off the road in front of the hospice.
Marla was waiting for her, standing inside the door.
“What in the name of God happened?” Kate strode down the hallway, noticing vaguely that Alice was in the reception area in her wheelchair and gesturing to her.
Marla said from behind her, “The doctor we use is on his way but it’ll take him awhile to get here from County General.”
“Did you reach Aimee Grant?”
“She’s on her way.”
The door to the room was closed. “Stay here,” Kate ordered Marla, opening the door and closing it behind her on whatever reply Marla was making.
Then, only slowly, she approached the bed.
Maggie lay on her back, head sunk deep in the hollow of her pillow, arms neatly along her sides, the dandelion fuzz on the very top of her head illuminated in a waning ray of sunlight slanting through the window. Her eyes were closed, her mouth slightly askew, her jaw lax. Her oxygen tube lay on the other side of her pillow. Kate stared at the tube and then her chest, willing it to rise and fall, her throat filling with anguish at the stillness before her, implacable, irreversible. Her gaze became liquid, blurring as she stared, her eyes burning with tears.
She walked over to the bed, placed her hand on Maggie’s chest, warm through the soft flannel gown. She raised her hand to Maggie’s face, stroked her cheek; it felt feverish. She leaned over and kissed Maggie’s forehead, caressing the fine soft hair on her head, aware of a slight powdery smell from the bedclothes mixed with a faint acidy earthiness that might be urine.
Only gradually did she acquire wider awareness, hear a stirring and realize that Marla had come quietly into the room and was slightly behind her. Kate turned blindly to her.
“I’m so sorry, Kate.” There were tears in Marla’s voice. She briefly touched Kate’s arm. “We all came to love her.”
“Thank you,” she managed.
Remembering her last time with Maggie, looking again at the oxygen tube, she felt her investigative impulses awaken, even in the presence of the body of her dearest friend. She did not resist them. I owe her no less.
“Did you touch her?”
“To take her pulse.”
“Nothing else?”
“No. Kate…she was dying. She had a DNR. It’s our policy besides.” Marla’s face and voice were calm, but the hands clasped at the waist of her white scrubs washed each other incessantly. Kate wondered fleetingly how the men and women caring for the clientele within these walls could contend with death and impending death on a daily basis.
Kate nodded. “Has anyone else touched her? Or anything?”
She shook her head. “I left the room and closed the door. Came out to make the call to the doctor and then the two calls to you and Aimee Grant.” Her dark eyes were fixed on Maggie.
“No one was with her? Alice—”
“Was in the hallway. I told her she’d need to wait for a while in reception.”
“Marla,” Kate said quietly, “when you last spoke with her did she seem alert?”
She nodded.
“Medicated? What was her speech like?”
“Normal. She was very alert, Kate. Same as always.”
“Did she have visitors today?”
“Yes, but a lot earlier, not too long after I came in, maybe noon. Some of the ones who come every few days. An African American woman, a Latina, and a very…mannish woman.”
Kate nodded. Raney, Tora, Patton, from Maggie’s days at the Nightwood Bar. Kate too had known them for decades and she could not imagine any of them doing anything, it seemed an impossibility that one of them would give Maggie anything to…
“Marla, how long have you been in hospice work?”
“Sixteen years.”
“In your experience,” Kate asked, “does something like this…happen? Someone terminal says goodbye, yet seems to be very okay, and then just…passes?”
“Kate…remember…she was dying,” Marla said, looking at her in compassion. “But yes it does, and something like it actually happened to a close friend of mine. She was in Cedars for tests for persistent back pain. Turned out to be terminal spinal cancer. Her doctor told me all she said was, ‘The hell you say,’ and that night she walked all over the hospital and that very same night she died. The will to live—who knows?”
This did not apply here, Kate thought, or Maggie would have willed her death. She nodded. “Thank you, Marla.”
“Shall I give you some more time…to be with her, Kate?”
She was peering anxiously at Kate, and for the first time, because of a drop of moisture landing on skin inside the collar of her polo shirt, Kate realized her face was wet. “Please,” she said, wiping the tears from her face with both hands. “I’d appreciate it. I don’t know if you could get word to me when Aimee Grant arrives—before she comes in here—but if you could…”
“I’ll do my best to watch for her.”
Hearing the door close, Kate pulled a chair up beside the bed. “What did you do, Maggie?” she whispered. “I know you did something. What did you do?”
She took Maggie’s forever-stilled hand in her own, clasping it. Welling emotion from twenty-three years of friendship flowed through her as she gazed at Maggie for what she knew would be her final time alone with her, and she gave in to everything she felt.
Sometime later Maggie’s battered old coffee mug caught her eye and she released her hand to pick it up from the side table. Wiping her eyes with a sleeve of her polo shirt, holding the mug as if it could help her divine the secrets held in this room, she noticed dregs of tea half dried in its bottom. She replaced the mug and got up to look over the room.
The wastebaskets were empty, in this room and the tiny bathroom. No surprise, the room had been cleaned before Marla called her. If someone had brought in something in packaging, that packaging was now gone.
Back at the bed, after first placing a hand on Maggie’s shoulder as if asking permission, Kate adjusted the position of Maggie’s arms enough to lift the blanket and peer under it to where Maggie’s stick-thin legs extended down the bed, then restored the blanket and, reverently, the position of Maggie’s arms. She looked at the pillow, the oxygen tube, then again at the side table. Aside from Maggie’s mug there was a small bottle of Arrowhead water, its seal unbroken. If Maggie had had anything to drink within several hours it was not apparent, unless Charlie had cleaned away a finished bottle of water…
Kate heard a sound, the doorknob turning, saw the door edge open aided by the insistent wheel of a wheelchair.
“Alice,” Kate said quietly, “don’t come in. You can’t come in here.”
“I have to explain,” Alice said in a quivery voice. She pushed her chair through the door and into the room. “I told Marla I was coming down the hall to visit Ida and Mary.”
Alice gazed at Maggie, not Kate; then closed her eyes and with her eyes still closed she said, “I told you I owed you, Miss Police Detective.”
Kate felt her heart stop.
Her blood stop.
Every nerve in her body stop.
She stood rooted, paralyzed with horror.
Her voice came back first. A croak: “You—you—”
Then her body galvanized into action and she leaped toward Alice.
With a shriek Alice threw both hands up, her head jerking to the side, her body shrinking back into the chair. “Before you kill me!” she screeched. “Look!” She was shaking one of her raised hands.
In that hand was a book: The Kiss That Counted.
“Maggie said I should give you this book. She said you’d be acting like this at first—”
“At first?” Kate seized the book. Flung it. It slammed against the wall and ricocheted onto Alice’s bed. Kate pulled Alice’s wheelchair into the room. Knelt down in front of the wheelchair and with her hands gripping the cold metal arms of the chair, she looked directly, fiercely into Alice’s watery blue eyes, the whites veined yellow with jaundice.
“Listen to me, Alice. Tell me what happened in this room—”
There was a soft knock on the door.
“Stay out!” Kate bellowed. “Stay the hell out!”
“She said you couldn’t do it.” Alice gripped her robe closed at her throat as if to protect it from Kate’s hands. “She said it was what you needed.” Her withered cheeks sank inward as she spoke, but her voice suddenly acquired force. “She said you’d do it if you could but you couldn’t. She said it’s the best thing I could do for you even if you didn’t know it. You didn’t want to see how she would die and remember it. She said it was her very last days and it would be a gift for you not to see them. It was for you. She said I could never in your life do anything better for you. I did it for her. I did it for you.”
Kate collapsed back on her ankles and thought she might faint. Please God stop me from killing her…She gripped her head between her hands and closed her eyes to try to gain equilibrium.
“Alice,” she said heavily, “tell me what you did.”
But she already knew. She already understood how she had done this. The removed oxygen tube had said it all.
“Over this week we got it all planned out. Maggie made her goodbyes to you and that pretty woman, that other close friend last night—”
Again remembering Maggie’s embrace of her, her kiss, her soft, sweet “I love you, my dear friend,” Kate took a deep, shuddering breath.
“—and more people today. Charlie cleaned the room and helped me get in my wheelchair and I went into the hallway. As soon as I saw him go back down the hallway I came back in and she pulled her tube away and I got my pillow and just put it over her face and held it down and just leaned on it as long as I could.”
Kate dropped her head into her hands, squeezing her eyes shut as if that would block out the images.
“She didn’t fight at all. She never moved. Look at her, Kate,” Alice pleaded. “She wanted this. With all her heart.” She put a shaky hand on Kate’s arm.
Kate shook it off. But she lifted her head. And did look.
There was no struggle for life reflected in that body. Maggie had closed her own eyes in welcoming the pillow that brought death. In that face was only acceptance. Only peace.
“You can arrest me,” Alice said in a nearly inaudible voice. “But my liver function is down to where the most they give me is two weeks.”
“You and Maggie,” Kate said bleakly. “You really had this worked out.”
“We were friends.”
Kate looked into the rheumy, lemony eyes of Maggie Schaeffer’s killer.
Friends. In a week.
As if hearing the thought, Alice said, “Anytime we met in our lives we’d have been friends. Who knows, I could have gone the way of my gay nephew with her, maybe we could have been more.”
Kate looked away, and her gaze was caught by the book on Alice’s bed. The Kiss That Counted.
“She wrote something in there,” Alice said, following Kate’s gaze. She reached into the pocket of her dressing gown. “She said I should give this back to you.”
Kate got to her feet, took the pen she had given Maggie the night before and slid it into her pocket. “I need to get you out of here,” she told Alice.
“What are you going to do with me? Arrest me? Kill me?”
“Kate? Kate?”
Aimee’s voice, from the hallway, other voices, a rapping on the door.
A hand on the doorknob, Kate looked back at the peaceful, forever stilled figure on the bed. Never to see that face again…never to look into those eyes…never to hear that voice that always, always brought wisdom into her life…
As she opened the door, loss in all its finality descended on Kate in a consuming pall of desolation and darkness.