Follow Her Home (4 page)

When I got out of the car, I told myself it was just to finish my cigarette. I smoked without hurry, standing next to the driver's side door. I stared and stared at the BMW, waiting for my night vision to kick in. My cigarette waned, and I felt the creep of a thrill as I realized I wasn't leaving without a closer look. Luke had called on me to be his detective, and now the dark windows seemed to emit a tempting, dangerous gleam, tickling my curiosity until it became an undeniable itch.

I approached the beemer and went around to the passenger side to try the door. Locked, of course. I knew a couple of tricks that could, in theory, on television, fix that, but my audacity ended before breaking into strange vehicles through untried means. Marlowe might've opened a suspicious car and checked the glove compartment for the name on the registration, but he didn't seem to face many locks in his day, let alone alarm systems. I brought my face as close as I could to the window, even opening my cell phone to shine some light on it, but the glass must have been tinted with obsidian.

I felt it before I heard it. I heard it before I registered it. A dull cotton explosion and the copper taste of blood behind my nose, the memory of a whoosh in the air, footsteps receding in a dream. The chronology of sensation blurred, but it ended in thick, oily, all-consuming black.

 

Three

When I came to, it was in a cloud of disbelief mixed with the stale taste of morning breath. I gritted my teeth in a stiffened grin, constricting my throat and swallowing with a hard sound that echoed between my ears. I had a headache. I groaned and lay still with my eyes shut tight. As far as I could tell, I had been sapped.

It took me a seventy-second minute to remember the BMW, Lori's house, Luke's party, Iris, and I spent the next minute drawing the line that led to my stint as an unconscious detective. It made me want to laugh and cry. Half an hour of being my own noir hero and I ran into something as real and unrealistic as I could have hoped for.

It was different for Marlowe. Chandler wrote seven Marlowe novels and the hero got knocked out in almost every one. When it happened, he would wake up, shake it off, and calculate to the minute how long he'd been out. He was a private detective, after all, paid to stick his nose in places where it was liable to get punched into his skull. He was never surprised by it, never even mentioned being offended. For all my fascination with the violence of noir, I had never fantasized its intrusion into my own life. I stayed still for several minutes, blinking often.

I sat up where I lay on a hard bench, letting my feet fall wooden on the ground, and looked around. The timid light and the pale blue sky said it was early, maybe six or seven. I was no longer on Citrus. The geometric head of a Koo Koo Roo chicken winked down at me from behind. Someone had seen fit to cart me unconscious to Larchmont, on the Beverly end. At a red light at the empty intersection, one car waited patiently to continue down Beverly.

My clutch lay miraculously at my side, where it must have been tucked behind my back as I slept off the sapping. I snapped open the clasp and looked inside. Cash, credit card, driver's license, car keys, cigarettes, matches—check, check, check, check, check, check, and check again. Cell phone—no such luck. I still had my shoes. Even better—my clothes.

I lit a Lucky Strike and tried to think. I considered that I might have been violated and re-dressed, and I felt the mist of a cold sweat forming on my forehead. This was a detail Marlowe never seemed to deal with when he woke up from forced slumber. I checked my clothes and all seemed to be in order, and I didn't feel like I'd been touched beyond my injury in the last few hours. I liked that I still had all my cash—I figured passing up petty thievery would be like stinting on the after-dinner mint after a double cheeseburger with fries. I decided I had greater causes for panic.

I stood up with the feeling that my brain was swelling out of my skull. I put a hand to the back of my head and stroked the welted, tender bulge right below my hairline's end with the tip of my middle finger. It stung but I couldn't leave it alone, and I marveled at it with all fingers and both hands in turn as I walked down Beverly. I was at the entrance to the Marlowe Apartments within minutes.

I buzzed for Luke. One buzz didn't do it, and neither did two. I jammed my thumb into the smooth concave buzzer and held it, the quack from the intercom vying with my headache for the use of my ears.

A boy in ratty, fraying sneakers and oversize gym clothes came huffing to the door, keys in hand. He gave me a wry grin as he opened it and held it for me. I nodded and gave him the sweetest smile I could muster, which might have been one notch above a frothing snarl. I walked to the elevator and hit the Up button. The boy stood next to me, feeling free to stare. I heard a series of words and snickers dribble out the side of his mouth over the ringing in my head. I looked back at him, unable to make sense of his mumbles. “Are you talking to me?”

He shuffled for a second, then tried to look cool, standing tall in his sneakers with elbows straight, hands folded in front of him. “I said, looks like someone had a fun night.”

I opened my mouth with my lower jaw locked wide and tight, tongue pressing up against my back teeth. I furrowed my brows and blinked twice, slow, deliberate, annoyed. “You have no idea.”

“You look cute, though. Do you live here?”

I smiled a real one. “Are you hitting on me?”

He stuttered a string of apologetic words.

“How old are you? And Jesus, what time is it?”

“I'm seventeen, and it's—”

I shook my head. “That's called a rhetorical question. You'll learn all about it in English.”

We rode up to the third floor in unpleasant silence thick as jam. I got out and noticed that he did not, though he'd also failed to press the button for another floor. I felt a little sorry for him. Seventeen. He was only a boy.

*   *   *

The week after Iris missed her junior prom, I tracked down her intended escort, a clean-cut kid named Paul. It was the beginning of my summer vacation, but Greenwood High was still in full swing. It was a Monday. I had been home for four days.

It was a gorgeous campus in Studio City with old, distinguished buildings and state-of-the-art furnishings. The tuition was more than our mom could afford, but Iris and I got just enough aid that she decided our private education in the hands of L.A.'s most reputable school was worth the remaining figures. Our classmates were a mix of rich kids and smart kids who were, for the most part, as easy to tell apart as goats and sheep. The ones with Rolexes and famous parents tended to be rich. The ones in AP Calculus, smart. There was some overlap. Luke was a notable example.

Paul Kim was a smart kid, or so I'd always thought. I found him eating lunch with two friends, their table strewn with napkins and homework. I saw him smiling from a hundred feet away. Someone was telling a story, and the mood was light. It made me stop walking, for a moment. My steps were hard-heeled and heavy, and it felt incongruous to stomp to a table of boys shooting the breeze on a school day.

He was a good-looking kid, tall and tan with a perpetual cowlick and a disarming set of large teeth. He was the year between Iris and me, and when I was a senior, the three of us had been on the same campus. I saw his face around school before they started dating, but I had never known more than his name.

She started calling him her boyfriend in the middle of my senior year. Iris was fifteen, and our mom grumbled but gave her acquiescence. After all, Paul spoke beautiful Korean, and he had done admirably on his SAT. He and Iris spent a lot of weekends on the family couch, watching television, and he was good about getting up and greeting our mom when she walked into or out of the room. They were never caught with the door closed.

Based on what Iris had told me, I liked him well enough. He was from Glendale. He played the cello. He had an older sister and a beagle named Bob. He and Iris met in the Asian-American Club, and he pursued her in various nonthreatening ways. Toward the beginning of his courtship, I saw him walking with her to class, holding her books. I smiled at Iris, and she turned bright red.

She had never had a boyfriend, and she flourished under the attention. I watched her affection for Paul grow night by night. She told me about their dates, and about sweet things he had said to her, and kisses they'd shared. I realized later that after I left for college, she stopped talking about him unless I asked.

“Hi Paul,” I said. My arms were crossed and my tone shaped to inspire fear.

He looked up with his mouth open, his soggy sandwich gripped in one hand. It took him a second to register me standing there. His eyes jumped wide.

“Juniper, hey. What're you doing here?”

His friends had stopped talking, and they were staring at me. I recognized them as faces from old scenery, but they probably knew me as Iris's big sister.

“We need to talk,” I said.

He looked to his friends, and one of them shrugged.

“Sure.” He turned to the shrugger. “Can you guys watch my stuff?”

“Bring it,” I said.

He gave me a look that was less scared than confused. I felt a ripple of anger spread through my chest.

“Okay.” He followed me toward the visitor parking lot with an eager gait.

As soon as we were out of earshot, he asked, “Is Iris okay?”

I threw him a glare that kept him silent until we reached my car.

Once we were inside, I locked the door. “I find it hard to believe that you're just hanging out at school, eating a sandwich.”

He backed into the far corner of the passenger seat. “What?”

“Do you have any idea what your girlfriend is going through?” I heard my tone go harsh at “your girlfriend.”

He leaned forward and looked at me until I gave him eye contact. When I did, he lowered his eyebrows and raised his cheekbones in an unhappy smile. “Am I crazy? What girlfriend?”

The next words nearly stopped in my throat, but I pressed on. “My sister. Iris Song. Your girlfriend.”

He sighed, slow and quiet. We sat without talking while my mind raced. I had come to yell at Paul, to blame him for taking advantage of my sister, for being cruel and insensitive and unforgivably dumb. It was an impulse visit born of my own sense of failure, the anger and disappointment I could turn nowhere else.

“I think you have something wrong here. Iris broke up with me in October.” He managed a smile when I didn't respond. “Is she okay? I haven't seen her around school.”

I could picture my stunned expression. I pinched my sinuses and closed my eyes. I didn't know what to say, so I repeated what he had told me. “You broke up more than six months ago?”

He nodded.

“I don't know if I believe you.”

“Believe me. It was tough.”

“How did it happen?”

I hadn't decided whether I was embarrassed or convinced he was lying to my face. Either way, Paul must have felt it best to say what he knew.

“She was kind of depressed when you left, but I thought things were fine between us. We were talking about where I might apply to school, and what we would do if I left the state. She broke up with me a week after my birthday. She made sure I got my present first.”

“Did she say why?”

“She was vague about it. She said I was a great guy, and she actually thanked me for treating her well. And of course, she asked if we could still be friends.” He paused, shaking his head, savoring the sour taste of the words. “I think when it comes down to it, she never liked me the same way I liked her. There's no good way to tell someone that.”

I was finding it hard to suspect him of lying. The Paul Iris painted was guileless and gentle, and while I had to admit my sister was capable of deception, I could not accept that she had masterminded his entire portrait.

I had come to chastise the source of Iris's misery, but now I had a new set of questions. Of course, “What happened to my sister?” was qualitatively different from the mysteries of a Chandler yarn. I had no client but my own thirst for knowledge and a contrite explanation. But there was the whodunit aspect—my sister was pregnant and I needed a name. The culprit had no identifiable marks, but I found myself in closed quarters with a potential lead.

I chose my words with care. “Do you think Iris might have been interested in someone else?”

He winced and gave me a sad smile. He was full of them, and they made me sorry. “I thought about it. It was so sudden it seemed kind of passionate. I thought there must be someone else. But I think I was just being jealous. I never found anyone likely.”

I wanted to pat Paul on the head, and I realized I had lost all doubt that he was telling the truth. He didn't seem to know anything, and I was thankful I hadn't mentioned Iris's pregnancy in my accusations.

“So are you guys still friends?”

“I think so, but I don't know. She seems to have disappeared lately. I was happy to see you, to be honest. Is she doing okay?”

I shook my head. There was no use saying there was nothing wrong. “She's been really depressed these last few months. I guess she hasn't been going to school. She missed prom, didn't she?” I caught myself. “Though I guess you weren't her date.”

“No, I did ask her to prom. She let me know she wasn't coming. I went with a group.” I must have looked at him with something like pity, because he added, “It was fine.” He scratched his head and looked down at his shoes.

*   *   *

As I walked out of the elevator, I felt a glimmer of guilt toward the teenage boy, but my headache took over by the time I was halfway to Luke's apartment.

I stomped to his door, saw the sign from the night before torn off and lying in the hallway, and knocked. I tried my best to be obnoxious about it, with loud, stiff-knuckled raps and nonsensical rhythms. I was at it a solid minute before Luke came to the door in an undershirt and yellow athletic shorts, his hair a nest wrought by blind birds.