City of War (16 page)

I was on my way through the living room back to the kitchen when I saw the silver BMW from the cemetery pull up out front. I stood in the shadows and watched as a tall woman got out. She was wearing an exquisite green and black designer dress, black heels and large, dark sunglasses. The most striking thing about her, though, was her hair. It was shoulder-length platinum and styled dramatically over her right eye and cheek, like the 1940s actress Veronica Lake. She looked up and down the street, then opened her purse and extracted a key. I watched her come up the walk, then I melted back down the hall.

The key turning in the lock was loud in the empty house, and when she entered, I could hear her hesitate for a moment before she closed the door. I had no idea who she was, but since she was obviously going to stay for a while, I didn’t want to scare her witless. I called out, “I’m in the bedroom. I’m coming out.”

Her reply showed no trepidation. “I should hope so. I can smell you from here.”

I suddenly realized I’d been sweating on and off for several hours, and with no ventilation in the place, I must have been pretty gamey. I walked into the living room. “Sorry, it’s been a rough day.”

I’m not usually overcome by physical beauty, but this woman was truly dazzling. And she had a presence that filled the room. Heat, musk and sex.

She looked me up and down. “Mind telling me what you’re doing in my house?”

“Your house?” I managed.

“Yes, I’m Archer Cayne. I grew up here.”

Suddenly, my cell phone rang. I answered it.

It was Jake. “I just talked to some lawyer in Santa Monica. A Virgil Bateman. There’s no will, but there’s a sister.”

“I know, she just caught me breaking and entering.”

“What?”

“I’ll explain later.” I clicked off.

“You’re the boyfriend,” she said. “I saw you at the funeral. There any coffee in this place?”

“Sorry to disappoint. I was a friend, that’s all. And the only other time I was here, I was too busy trying to keep my head from being caved in to check the cupboards.”

“I won’t ask. You have a name?”

“I’m sorry, Miss Cayne, I’m Rail Black.” I extended my hand, and she took it. Her grip was warm and strong. Sure of herself.

“Call me Archer.” Then, as if she were tired of answering the question, she added, “My father was a naval aviator. ‘Archer’ was his call sign.”

I was about to say something when the room began to spin. I staggered and felt myself starting to go. Too many painkillers, no food. “I need to lie down,” I managed, and I felt her strong hands helping me toward the bedroom.

When I awakened, it was pitch black. The clock across the
room read 9:48. I’d been out almost eight hours. I was aware of the pain in my chest again, but it was duller. Bearable. I took stock. I was undressed, and I couldn’t smell my sweat any more, just soap. Evidently she’d cleaned me up. It was like being back in the hospital.

Then I realized I wasn’t alone. She came into my arms, and it was like someone had thrown a switch. She moved against me with the kind of hunger that is both electrifying and unsettling. While my body reacted, my conscious mind tried to detach, analyze what was happening. But she was skilled and voracious, and I couldn’t hang onto a thought.

She started to roll onto me, and I winced involuntarily as she pressed against my chest. Immediately, she sat up, straddled my hips and forced me inside her. As she plunged down with all her weight, she gasped, and I felt her body convulse in a violent orgasm.

And then she began thrusting against me with such force that I realized whatever trip she was on, it had nothing to do with me. It wasn’t even really sex. It was primal—no, savage. I reached up to caress her breasts, but she pushed my hands away, hard.

I felt myself rushing to climax, and when I came, she crashed again. And still she wasn’t finished, and I felt myself responding again as she continued driving her hips against mine unrelentingly.

Somebody’s porch light went on next door, sending a sliver of light through the curtains and bathing the room in a blue glow. She was too much into whatever moment she had found to notice. Her head was bent forward, the long, blonde hair obscuring her face as she grunted and moaned from somewhere deep in her throat. Her breasts weren’t large, but they were perfectly formed, the aureoles wide and brown. And this time, when I touched them, she didn’t object.

I raised one hand to her cheek, and she twisted her head away. But I persisted and pushed her hair back, taking her face between my hands. She sat straight up, and now I could see what she was trying to hide. A deep, ugly knife scar
running from her forehead, down through her right eye and halfway down her cheek. The eye itself was dead, sewn shut by the doctor who had performed this grim surgery.

“Go ahead,” she spit out as her hips moved even more wildly. “Go ahead, fuck the scar! That’s what all of you want! So go ahead, fuck it! Fuck the scar!”

She threw her head back and came again, and so did I. It was a release void of passion, care or even much awareness. It was simply over.

But she continued to thrust, beginning the process again. I grabbed her hips and held them still. She convulsed a couple more times, then her breathing began to ease, and after a couple of moments, she rolled onto the bed beside me.

I put my arm around her and pulled her close. Moments later, I felt the warm wetness of tears against my neck. What they were for, I couldn’t guess. Just before she fell asleep, she murmured, “Was I as good as my sister?”

When I awoke a second time, she was still sleeping soundly. I got up, every muscle stiff, found a towel and stood under a very hot shower for a very long time.

I made coffee, and the sun was beginning to break through the curtains in the kitchen when I heard the shower go on again. I checked my phone and saw there were two messages.

One was from Mallory, concerned he hadn’t heard from me. The second was from Stephen Bennett, a friend who lives in Los Feliz. I’d called him a few days earlier, and his message said he’d located Marta Videz—the mother of the dead kid, Kiki.

I turned my attention to the box from the museum. Kim’s computer was on top. If it’s not done in a certain way, data can still be recovered from a wiped hard drive, but my guess was the Getty’s security experts were good, so I set the laptop aside.

I took out a small cactus with a tiny brass tag hanging around it that read, HUG ME—I’M LONELY. Next came a red file folder with some old credit card statements and two
letters from a guy named Lew, the most recent of which, dated eighteen months ago, said he was sorry, but he was getting married and moving back to Boise to start an organic farm. It seemed Lew didn’t use e-mail. I immediately like the guy.

Further down, I found a ticket for a shoe repair shop, a pair of grinning alligator bookends, an assortment of pens and pencils, twelve dollars in ones—probably for the Coke machine I’d seen in the museum hallway—an eyeglass screwdriver, a scrimshaw-handled letter opener, a cell phone charger and her passport.

I put the rest of the items back in the box and opened the passport. The immigration stamps confirmed what Abernathy had said. I looked at the France trips first. There was a calendar taped to the refrigerator. I moved the box to the kitchen counter and compared the dates.

For each trip, she was stamped into the country on a Friday and back into L.A. later the next week. I knew the route. Thursday overnight to Paris, two-hour connection, commuter flight to Nice, arriving in time for dinner. Depending on the airline, sometimes you can do it an hour faster through London.

Giving her two hours at LAX on the outbound, another two at Nice returning and an hour of leeway, that totaled thirty-five hours of travel time. On her shortest trip, that left her fifty-five to sixty hours on the ground. Enough time for almost anything. Eyeballing the other trips, they looked similar.

Archer came into the kitchen wearing one of Kim’s nightgowns, her wet hair combed over the right side of her face. I slipped the passport into my pocket.

“That coffee any good?” she asked.

“Not prime, but hot and strong.”

She poured herself a cup and sat down across from me. “Surprised to find you still here.”

“Why’s that?”

“Once the mystery’s gone, the guy usually is too.”

“You need to start hanging out with a better class of people.”

She looked at me, started to say something, then decided not to.

I said, “Give me your cell phone.”

“What for?”

“Just give it to me.”

She went into the living room and came back with her purse. She fished the phone out and handed it over. I programmed my number into it. “In case you ever need anything…or just want to talk.”

For the second time, she opened her mouth then closed it without speaking.

“City of War,” I said without any lead-in and watched her reaction.

She smiled nonchalantly. “That would be anywhere I ever lived. Which guy do you want to hear about?”

I’d found out what I wanted to. “Another time.” I smiled. “When did you leave here?”

“At fourteen. Went to live with a cousin in Boston. Then dropped out of high school a month before graduation and bolted for New York.”

“Where you became a model,” I said.

“Kim tell you that?” she asked accusatorily.

“I wasn’t kidding when I said I never knew you existed. I saw you walk, that’s all.”

She relaxed a little. “A blessing or a curse, I don’t know. But once you learn to move on a runway, you can’t get rid of it.”

“And you want to?”

“Sometimes. It’s like a subliminal message to every jerk with a hard-on. Pretty soon, they’re sniffing and snorting and rubbing their cock on your leg.”

“I don’t suppose you’ve ever considered you might be giving off other signals.”

She flashed. “And like every girlfriend I’ve ever known hasn’t told me the same thing. Whoever was handing this shit out should have had to get a consent form signed.”

I didn’t think she needed to hear that, in my opinion, she was working it for all it was worth, so I said gently, “Someday I’d like to hear what happened.”

“What happened to what?”

She knew what I meant, so I let her decide on her own.

It took a minute, then she sighed. “It ain’t a fucking cliff-hanger. The model’s curse—a rich guy who’s going to take care of you the rest of your life. Most of the time you know it’s over when your Christmas gift goes from a four-carat emerald to a magazine subscription. But that’s not the way it works with Russians. They figure they fuck you, they own you. And besides, they’re so good in the rack, they’ve ruined you for anybody else. Jesus, where do they come up with this shit?

“Well, this guy, Marko, explained the rules a couple of times—with his fists—but I was a slow learner and thought the police would help.” She looked away, and her voice dropped. “Marko spent the night drinking wine with the
Sureté
captain, then they drove him home. I wasn’t finished packing, but I was finished getting my picture taken.”

“Where’s Marko now?”

“He went back to Moscow, and somebody threw him in prison for not paying off. I read he’s out now and running for Parliament. Think I should write?”

“I’m sorry about your sister,” I said to break the moment.

“Stepsister,” she said.

I was confused. “But your name’s Cayne.”

“And here I thought I’d fucked your brains out.”

“So Commander Cayne
wasn’t
Kim’s father?”

“I was pretty self-absorbed in those days, but I probably would have noticed her at dinner. No, J. Edgar, she and that asshole old man of hers, Truman, didn’t show up until four years after Dad had been declared dead.”

Suddenly, things were more complicated. I said, “Moth
ers don’t usually let their daughters leave home at fourteen. But if there’s a stepfather, nine times out of ten, that’s the reason.”

“Pretty ordinary shit, I know.”

“Unless you’re the one it’s happening to.”

Archer’s voice took on a sardonic tone. “Mom just couldn’t seem to shake loose from those crazy, madcap flyboys. Grew up a Pensacola girl, where the career choices were being a pilot or marrying one. That’s where she bagged my father—her word, not mine. I never met the guy. Disappeared before I took my first breath. Truman York was just one more in a long line of tall, clear-eyed gents with one hand on their dick and the other on the doorknob. A KC-130 jockey out of Nellis. Three wives long gone and stuck with a snot-nosed brat from one of them. Mom met him in some Vegas saloon, so for Christmas that year, she got her itch scratched, and I got a kid sister. Thanks, Santa.”

“You and Kim didn’t get along?”

“Truth is, she was probably okay, but I was so pissed at inheriting a new father over a Miller Lite I never gave her a chance. We probably had a lot in common. Pilots are the same wherever you find them. Forget management by committee; learn to duck.”

“So you were odd girl out.”

“You could say that. That is, until Captain York decided to sample some fine teen pussy. Then I got real popular.”

“When did your mother find out?”

“Pretty quick, but she didn’t do anything except start drinking a little earlier in the day. So I worked it out myself and never looked back.”

“Except every day.”

She looked at me, and I thought she was going to get angry, but instead she nodded. “I’ve watched Oprah and Dr. Phil out the ass, and I’ve heard all the excuses, but I’ve never quite understood not protecting your kid.”

I had no answer for that either.

“I used to lie awake at night and hope my real dad died in
a lot of pain. Makes a lot of sense, doesn’t it? You know why we hurt the ones we love?”

“Maybe because we can.”

“No, because they deserve it.”

She got up and poured herself another cup of coffee. “I’d kill for a fucking cigarette. I quit, but sometimes…”

I ignored her. “Did Kim have any idea what her father was doing to you?”

“I don’t know. It wasn’t the kind of girl talk you get into over pizza and a sitcom. For all I knew, he was doing her too.”