Numbly, Kate went into the kitchen alcove. Picked up Aimee’s mug and slopped coffee into it and took a deep swallow heedless of its temperature. It scalded its way down, resembling the burning rawness of that first scotch of the day. That first scotch being something she had not experienced yesterday, for the first time in months. She could not remember how many months.
Anne. Aimee. Three decades. And I still don’t seem to know the first goddamn thing about women. Aimee’s right. I am stupid stupid stupid.
And now she couldn’t go to Maggie any longer for her counsel. As for Calla Dearborn, how could she even begin to fill Maggie’s shoes?
Focus, she told herself. It was imperative that she focus. Compartmentalize. Right now she could not afford to think about any of it, especially the accusations Aimee had hurled at her. Maybe on the way to Yucca Valley.
Yucca Valley…Swallowing more coffee as she strode back into the bedroom, she located her cell phone in the pocket of her pants.
Three messages. Hoping her prickling of dread was not a premonition, she punched in her password. The first call had come in last night, Calla Dearborn, shortly after Kate had called her.
“Kate, I’m so sorry about this great loss in your life.” The voice was soft, pitched so low with compassion that Kate pressed the phone to her ear, straining to hear it. “Come in and talk about it when you can. I could make time for you tomorrow. Call me when you’re feeling up to it.”
Tears welling then overflowing, Kate wrathfully clawed them away. How could a few kind words from this woman dissolve her like this? How had this woman become so quickly and embarrassingly important to her?
Kate took a deep, shuddering breath, let it out, and listened to the announcement that the next call, the second message, had come in at 6:55 this morning.
“It’s Dora Terhune.”
Kate had to think a moment before remembering Dora in Victorville, Jean’s next-door neighbor, Dora the bitch.
“I just called the cops. I figured you’d want to know—Jean’s trailer got trashed. I heard some real loud banging in there sometime last night but you know, I was dead asleep and I thought it was Jean and her beefy boyfriend making their usual racket. Then this morning I see a car go screeching away and it isn’t Jean’s or the boyfriend’s truck so I go over there. Just to make sure everything’s okay, you know. So the door’s wide open and inside…well, whoever this guy is, he’s really smashed up the place. Looks like a hurricane went through. Mack that owns the trailer, he’s gonna shit himself. That’s pretty much all I know, I never saw anybody, but this is scary stuff, Kate. Somebody’s really coming after Jean, I just hope to hell she’s okay and he doesn’t come back. So you call me if you want to.”
Sitting down heavily on the bed, Kate waited for the final message. It had come in only five minutes later, at seven this morning. Dutch Hollander, and she could tell from his first word, his tone, that there would be no bad news.
“Nice night under the stars,” he reported in an easy, laconic tone. “I found a real good reconnaissance spot.” The rest of the message was equally concise: “Nothing suspicious, I did a good canvass. Had to drive five miles to get a damn cell phone signal.” She heard traffic noises; he was driving. “I’ll get some breakfast and keep checking for a call back. Let me know when you get here, Kate.”
Sagging with relief, she called the cabin in Yucca Valley.
When the phone was picked up she asked without preamble, “Everything’s okay?”
“Everything’s okay,” Cameron answered calmly. “How are you doing, Kate?”
“I’m okay, Joe. Sorry to be so late checking in with you. I just heard from Dora Terhune. Jean’s trailer was trashed last night. Dora didn’t see anyone, but we know it’s him. He really wrecked the place, lots more damage than in your house.”
Cameron let out an audible breath. “Jesus.”
“Seems he’s a lot angrier at Jean than he is at you.”
“He isn’t,” Cameron said shortly. “He hasn’t found us yet, is all.” His voice was grim. “He’s in a rage, he’s escalating. Does Jean know?”
“I just picked up the message.”
“Don’t tell her. She’s crazy-dumb enough to want to go back and not having a car won’t stop her.”
“I agree. Let’s keep her and her boy completely safe.”
“Kate,” he said somberly, “this isn’t somebody wanting revenge, this is Jack gone right off the rails. I know how he is when he gets like this—he doesn’t care about consequences, self-preservation, anything. This figures to be his very next stop. Don’t do this. Don’t come here—”
“Nothing’s changed for me, Joe,” she interrupted decisively. “I’ll be there. As soon I can.” If anything, Maggie’s death had sharpened her resolve, given more urgency to being there with him.
“Kate…then take whatever time you need, my friend. I know this is a very rough patch for you.”
“Thanks, Joe, see you early afternoon,” she said, and clicked off, no longer trusting her voice.
She wanted to call Calla Dearborn, set up an appointment. Mostly, she admitted, to again have the comfort of even brief contact with her. But with no idea when she might be back in the city, with no intention of filling her in on her present circumstances and running the risk of Dearborn attempting to divert her from the path she was bent on taking, of course she could not…
She called Dutch Hollander, who was apparently again out of cell phone range, and left a message to call her as soon as he could.
She gulped the rest of her coffee, used her borrowed toothbrush, and dressed, thinking that she could not remember the last time she had not showered in the morning. She wanted to carry the feeling of Aimee on her body along with the memory of their close connection throughout the night for as long as she could into this day. And the coming night in the high desert.
She was on her way out of the cottage when her phone rang with Hollander’s call back.
“Dutch, thanks for all this,” she said earnestly. “I owe you.”
“You owe me nothing,” he said emphatically. “Thanks don’t apply here, Kate. Joe’s been my friend since we were kids.”
She couldn’t argue with that. “I’m leaving now, should be there early afternoon. There’s been a development…” She informed him of Dora Terhune’s call, the destruction in Jean’s trailer.
“This guy is the fucking worst of bad news,” he muttered.
“You might just drop back into town and check in with Dora,” she suggested.
“Kate, I won’t leave you and Joe with this. I can—”
“I really get that,” she interrupted him, “but what he did to Jean’s trailer gives us a shot at stopping him. Jack has to be driving a stolen vehicle and if Dora can give us the make of what she saw taking off from the trailer, you can check the most recent stolen car records of locales where he’s been sighted and maybe get a match, a license plate. And if anyone nearby is an actual eyewitness to Jack Cameron going into or out of that trailer we can put out an APB for him and his vehicle, pick him up before he even begins his act three.”
There was a lengthy silence while Hollander considered this. Then he said, “I can see why Joe thinks you’re a great detective—”
A great detective who just let someone get away with murdering my best friend.
“—and it’s a good plan,” he conceded with clear reluctance in his tone. “Picking him up for grand theft auto and felony destruction of property would put him right back in jail. The best outcome. By far.”
A long shot, she could almost hear him thinking. But one that had to be explored, given the alternative.
“I’ll get on it,” he promised her.
“One more thing.” With a chuckle of embarrassment she admitted, “I feel like I’m chasing a shadow. Except for a photo of Jack when he was a kid, I have no clue what he looks like.”
He laughed. “Me either, after all his years of incarceration. I can only tell you what he looked like last time I saw him. Five-ten maybe, brown eyes, broken nose, dirty blond hair in a ponytail, scrawny, fidgety as hell—drugs, you can bet—a few razor-thin horizontal scars on his forehead and chin from the accident, his felony DUI. He might have beefed up in jail—”
“He’d get drugs there as easy as on the street,” Kate interjected.
“Sure. Never saw him in anything but knee-length shorts and ratty T-shirts.”
“Thanks, Dutch. Let me give you Joe’s landline number in the cabin. If you pick up this guy or whatever, let it ring twice. I’ll get back to you. Somehow.”
“Got it. Bring some warm clothes with you, my friend. It gets cold here in the desert at night. Good luck, Kate.”
“You too, Dutch,” she said fervently.
She left Aimee’s cottage, closing its door without a backward glance. She would drive to the condo to pack for the cabin and change clothes. Leave the ones she was wearing in the donate pile for Goodwill. She could never look at them again without thinking of Maggie, without remembering the churning despair of that drive to the hospice, her first sight of Maggie’s lifeless face…
* * *
As she unlocked the door and came into the condo, Miss Marple flew down the corridor from the bedroom and wound her meowing self around Kate’s ankles. It seemed days since she’d seen her furry companion, had left Jean and Jason here with Miss Marple who, Kate was sure, was spending much of her time sulking under the bed. The place was cool, quiet, empty, for which Kate was inordinately grateful. The absence of her visitors saved her from having to explain her abrupt departure last night, from having to make conversation with Jean while concealing her knowledge of the devastation to the place in Victorville they called home. Maybe Jean had taken Jason out to look for movie stars, she speculated, remembering how his earnest, guileless face had lit up at this particular blandishment to leave the cabin and travel here with his mother.
She leaned down and gently picked up Miss Marple, cradling and stroking her as she checked the food and water bowls, which were full, then looked approvingly over the living room which showed no evidence of her visitors, and finally walked on into the bedroom. The bed was made, the room was neat. The suitcases and clothes and games that had taken possession of the room and closet had done so in an organized manner.
With Miss Marple climbing onto and sitting on each item Kate laid out on the bed, she packed a duffel bag with thought and care for what she might need at Victorville. Including her new prescription. Including a bottle of Cutty Sark she grabbed from her stash in the kitchen. Medicinal, she told herself, stuffing it in the bottom of the bag. She did not know how long she might be holed up with Joe, how long she could hold off her need, and she would be of no use to him with her concentration fractured by a serious case of the jitters. She left a note on the counter that she would be staying with Cameron indefinitely, and included Aimee’s cell phone number as a close-by emergency contact. If it became necessary for Jean Velez to dial that number, explanations to Aimee as to who Jean Velez was and why she and her son were here in the condo would hardly be necessary. Unless she and Cameron could figure a way to prevent this onrushing, seemingly inevitable disaster, it would be all over the news.
With one final pat to Miss Marple, one final look around at this place she loved, her refuge from the world, Kate let herself out of the condo.
A few minutes later, making her way down Santa Monica, Kate realized she had one more very necessary stop to make before she headed for the 10.
Though La Brea was a major thoroughfare in Wilshire Division, it had been years since she’d driven down one particular stretch of it. She’d always instead chosen Highland or Fairfax for reasons having everything to do with avoidance of memory and emotions too inchoate and too laden with the potential to overwhelm her. A reluctance made up of unwillingness to resurrect the tragedy of the murder she had investigated here, unwillingness to see what changes had occurred along this street from when the Nightwood Bar had closed, unwillingness to learn what had become of the one place where she had been able to put aside the isolation of her police career, where she had spent some of the happiest and most convivial evenings of her life with her little band of lesbian friends in the warm glow of Maggie’s genial presence.
Traveling down La Brea from Santa Monica, she noted that the street itself hadn’t changed all that significantly over time. However rearranged the conglomerate of small independent businesses might have become over the years, they were still the same auto repair shops, furniture stores, bank branches, antique dealers, fast-food outlets. Only the cellular phone stores, a Petco, a Trader Joe’s at Third Street outwardly reflected cultural mutations of the new century.
As she approached the streets below Olympic, she felt a leaden justification for her resistance to driving along here. What had been a welcome landmark for her, a cheery bright yellow beacon of a place offering fried chicken and biscuits and gravy, was gone. She had never been in it, could not even remember the name. The only eatery on La Brea she could recall patronizing was Pink’s, a long-standing LA landmark for chili dogs that her first partner, Ed Taylor, had loved, his touchy digestion be damned. She wondered when the chicken place had been torn down. The buildings along the block opposite the Nightwood Bar had changed so much in configuration that she could no longer even distinguish exactly where it had once been located on the street.
She pulled into the crescent-shaped drive that for a single short block veered off and then back onto La Brea. It had been six years since Maggie had held court in her bar up on the hillside behind the businesses on this block, twenty-three years since the murder of Dory Quillin had first brought Kate to the Nightwood Bar, and to her community. She parked, and sat for a time, unable to stop the grief and melancholy washing over her. Then she got out of her car and walked along the shabby block, her memory indelible of that very first step in the investigation of the murder, when she had written in her notebook the names of the businesses that used to be here. A car rental agency, she recalled, a travel agency, dress shop, mailbox rental, an auto repair shop. The Casbah Motel and its restaurant with its window sign simply announcing Turkish Food.
All were gone. La Brea Center, read a sign over the middle doorway. The “Center” housed two hair salons, a photo shop, offerings of guitar lessons and readings from a psychic, a dusty window bearing a For Lease sign. In place of the Casbah was a featureless pink stucco motel.
She was brought to a halt by a discovery she had never imagined. The driveway that had once led up the hillside behind the motel had vanished. It had been flattened and incorporated into the parking lot for the motel. Much of the hillside behind the motel had been leveled and a retaining wall now supported the structures on what remained of the hill.
The Nightwood Bar was gone.
Completely, utterly gone. Vanished as if it had never existed.
Maggie gone…Her bar gone…
She stood rooted to the cracked sidewalk, assimilating this new reality, trying to peer beyond the phalanx of faded stucco storefronts into her imagination and memory of where the bar had once been. Gone, all of it was gone. As if it had been nothing but a mirage.
She closed her eyes for a moment, shook her head, turned and trudged back to her car, remembering and trying to take comfort in Maggie’s mantra: “Everything changes, Kate, nothing stays the same.”
As she got back into the Focus, she again shook her head, this time over the conversation with Maggie that had led her to what had turned out to be the invisible grave of the Nightwood Bar. Maggie telling her: “I don’t care what you do with my ashes but you know how much I love the sun, Kate, so please don’t dump me into the cold wet ocean…”
Kate had thought the environs of the Nightwood Bar would be the perfect place, would be where Maggie’s ashes should appropriately go.
No way in fucking hell would she ever put Maggie here.