Unzipped (29 page)

How had she died and when?

It was then that the phone rang.

“Mac?”

“Laney!” Guilt swamped me immediately; my best friend had taken a bullet for me, and I had been so wrapped up in my own problems I’d forgotten to even light a candle or something in her defense. Granted, I’d been accused of murder. But still . . . “What happened? Are you all right?”

“I’m fine, Mac. Relax.”

She sounded funny. Almost . . .
happy
. I glanced out the window into the black abyss of my yard. By the looks of things, hell hadn’t frozen over. “Where’s Solberg?”

“He just dropped me off a little bit ago.”

“No, Laney. You didn’t give him your home address.”

“Sure. Why not?”

“’Cuz he’s Solberg.”

She chuckled. “Actually, he was kind of sweet.”

Holy crap. Things were worse than I realized. “He’s still there, isn’t he?” I asked and lowered my voice a little. “Does he have a gun?”

“All right,” she said. “He’s a little nerdy, maybe . . .”

“Maybe!”

“But he’s smart.”

“Should I call the cops or come over myself? Yes, for the cops. No for me alone.”

“I’m serious. He was nice.”

I let that sink in for a while. “Did you leave your drink unattended for any length of time?”

“I’m not drugged.”

“Okay. Let’s assume that’s true. How many times did he call himself the Geekster of Love?”

“You’re kidding,” she said, and laughed as if it was the most hilarious thing she’d ever heard, which was pretty clear evidence that she was either drunk off her ass or hadn’t heard it before.

I scowled, thinking back. “How bout babe? How many derivatives did he think of for babe?”

“He called me Elaine and nothing else.”

“Well, that solves the mystery, then,” I said. “It wasn’t Solberg at all. It was an imposter.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. I could hear the refrigerator open as she waited for me to go on. She was probably searching for her imitation soy nuts.

“’Cuz Solberg can’t remember names,” I said.

I could hear her gasp and sat up straight, wired for trouble.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“You don’t suppose that’s why he had ‘Lane’ written on his arm, do you? So he could remember my name?”

I closed my eyes and rubbed my forehead. The thought made me tired. “Why yes, Dr. Holmes,” I said. “I do believe that might be the case.”

“Ohh, that’s sweet.”

I opened my eyes and scowled at the receiver. “Seriously, Laney, are you feeling okay?”

“Everything’s fine. I just thought I’d check in with you. You doing all right?”

“Sure,” I said, discounting my latest flights of fancy about LaMere being a murderer. I could hear Elaine munching. Apparently imitation soy nuts are crunchy.

“You need to get out more,” she said.

“Yeah, maybe we could double-date.” I checked my own fridge. There were no soy nuts. Imitation or otherwise. But I had a tidy leftover box from Chin Yung’s, the best Chinese restaurant in the universe. My stomach rumbled hopefully, but I have a strict rule: no lo mein between one and six in the morning. “I think Charles Manson is available—for about another ten to life.”

She laughed. “If you dated more you’d remember what’s out there.”

“You think I’ve forgotten?”

“Yeah,” she said, “I do.”

But when I hung up the phone, memories of Bomstad’s breath against my neck bobbed to the surface. I checked my locks, pulled the drapes, and went to bed.

No, I hadn’t forgotten.

O
fficer Crane?” I asked. I was standing on the sidelines of a soccer field where a bevy of gangly girls were chasing a ball around a dehydrated court. It reminded me of the time Cousin Kevin’s chickens had spied a grasshopper, but I set aside that odd analogy.

I’d driven halfway across the city to talk to Crane, though I’d tried to sound casual on the phone. After all, my theory of LaMere murdering Mrs. Hawkins seemed a little far-fetched even to my far-fetched way of thinking. Still, he was the officer on scene when her car had been found at the bottom of a canyon off Mulholland Highway.

“Yeah.” He had a big smile and a big voice. Unfortunately he had a gut to match. That’s the problem with family men, I thought, as his eyes strayed to the soccer field again. They tend to let themselves go. Oh, yeah—and they’re married.

“That-a-way, Chelsea!” he yelled and beamed.

I almost sighed. Because regardless of the size of their guts, big-hearted men who yelled encouragement to their spindly-legged daughters always looked good.

He’d been reluctant to meet with me, saying he was busy, and probably thinking I was a whack job. But I’d promised to keep it short and meet him anywhere he liked. And that was where we were.

“Sorry,” he said and offered me a hand and a smile. “That’s my Chelsea. Best forward in Maplewood Middle School.”

I didn’t know what to say about that because I didn’t know what a forward was, and “Yeah, she’s gonna be a heartbreaker” didn’t seem appropriate for the situation. Even from halfway across the field I could tell Chelsea had teeth like an overzealous beaver. But then, so had Laney, and look what happened there.

“You wanted to know something about a car accident?”

“Yes. Victoria Hawkins. She died a couple years ago.”

“Fall back. Fall back!” he yelled. I was startled, but then realized with my usual stellar genius that he wasn’t talking to me. “Sorry about that. Two years is a long time.”

“I know, and I regret springing this on you, but it’s extremely important.”

“Can you refresh my memory a little?”

What did that mean? Was I supposed to pay him or something? My mind was pumping madly, remembering the mortgage and my cantankerous septic system. How much info would a fiver get me?

“The circumstances,” he said, frowning a little, as though I might have lost my mind. “Where it happened. That sort of thing.”

“Oh, yes. Of course.” It looked like my lonely five bucks were safe. “She was heading north on Mulholland Highway. The date was July seventeen, 2003.”

He shook his head and hugged his clipboard to his belly. “Summer 2003,” he said. “Christ, there are so many car wrecks.”

“This was a Mercedes.”

“Yeah.” He chuckled a little. “And this is Hollywood.”

“She was the wife of a rather prominent therapist.”

He opened his mouth as if to yell again, then closed it and turned toward me. “That psychiatrist fellow? The one who wrote the book?”

My heart beat a little faster. “Yes. That’s the one.”

“Oh, sure—”

Hang in there, Chels! Hang in there!

“It was late when I seen it,” he said, switching gears like an old Corvette. “Near two in the morning. I remember that. I saw skid marks on the road and went to take a look. Sure enough, there was a car at the bottom. Looked like she’d almost made the curve then wham . . . lost control.”

“Was there . . .” I felt silly saying it, like a wannabe Matlock, but I had driven a long way to meet with him. “Was there any evidence of . . .” I wanted to say “foul play” but I’d forgotten my Sherlock Holmes hat in my armoire. “Do you have any idea why it happened?”

He shook his head. “Road curves like a son of a bitch in the hills down there. And I think . . . I might be wrong,” he added, squinting slightly. “But I think I heard she’d been drinking.”

I
have to admit I felt a little disappointed when I started up my Saturn. I’m not sure what I’d expected. Maybe I’d hoped for some fresh-faced officer of the law to tell me that yes, indeed, there had been a car bomb planted in Victoria Hawkins’s glove compartment, and uh-huh, they’d been able to lift Kathryn LaMere’s prints from it, but the press had neglected to report it.

It was getting dark when I pulled onto Mulholland Highway. As long as I was there, I might as well take a look at where Victoria had died, I thought. But by the time I passed Yerba Buena Road it was all but impossible to see into the craggy wasteland beside the winding road. Besides, I realized, as I cruised up a long grade, it was all craziness anyway. I was crazy. Rivera was for sure crazy. And Bomstad
had
been crazy. He’d taken an overdose of Viagra, knowing he had a heart condition, and Rivera, looking for a culprit, had accused me. But he didn’t really believe I was guilty. If he did, I’d ’a’ been pleading my case to a jury of my peers a long time ago.

Feeling somewhat relieved by my thoughts, I checked my rearview mirror, did a U-turn, and headed back from whence I’d come.

It was then that my brakes failed.

I pumped them twice, or possibly a hundred times, but things were happening faster and faster. The Saturn was picking up speed. The scenery was spinning by my window. I heard my tires squeal on the road, felt a bump beneath me. I’m sure I was terrified, but that memory is vague, swallowed by a million blurring thoughts. Maybe I had an impression of trees skimming past my left ear. Maybe I thought I was going to die. But suddenly there was nothing. Just blackness and the distant sound of a honking horn.

26

Maybe life does suck, Pork Chop, but it beats the hell out of the alternative.

—Glen McMullen,
imparting wisdom to his only daughter

I
WOKE UP STARING into a broad bank of snowy clouds. Hmmm. Apparently, I’d made it to heaven. So Father Pat’s prediction had been entirely wrong, despite the fact that he’d found me necking with . . . What was that kid’s name? I could remember his face perfectly. It had been as red as his hair and . . . Marv Kobinski. He’d had ears the size of cantaloupes and . . .

“Mac?”

I turned my head and was mildly surprised to find Elaine sitting beside me. Her eyes looked shadowed and her face gaunt.

“Laney?” It seemed unlikely we’d wind up in heaven at the same time. Or at all, maybe. “Umm . . .”

“Mac!” She was holding my hand. “You scared me to death. I thought . . . But you’re okay. Right? Just bruised?”

I stared at her in a haze for a moment, then shifted my gaze around the room. Turns out the ceiling wasn’t made of clouds but of bumpy white plaster. The room’s linoleum was beige and the other bed was narrow and perfectly made. Nothing looked familiar, and I was pretty sure my bed had never been perfectly made. “You were scared?”

“I called your mother.”

She
was
scared. No one called my mother unless absolutely necessary. Dad’s Chevy had once broken down on I-294. So he’d hitched a ride north in a cattle truck, then hoofed it home for the last four and a half miles. Mom had been telling him for weeks to get his car in the shop. Anyone with half a brain would rather take their chances afoot on the interstate than be I-told-you-so’d by my mother. “Why would you do that?”

“I thought you were dead.”

Huh, I thought, but didn’t voice my cleverness out loud.

“They brought you in last night.” Her perfect face creased. Did I actually fraternize with someone that pretty on purpose? How masochistic was I? And did I use the word fraternize in everyday conversation? “Don’t you remember anything?”

“No,” I ventured, then, “Yes.” A few details were drifting back to me. “The food’s really great at Chin Yung’s. I had chicken fried rice, and then . . .” It all rushed at me like high tide. “Oh, crap! There were flashing lights . . . and people.” My head hurt. I raised a hand to probe my cranium. “They were holding up fingers and asking me to count them.” I scowled, but my skull seemed to be in relatively good repair. “If they didn’t know how many fingers they had, couldn’t they ask someone else?”

Elaine laughed and stroked my hand, and I noticed that there were tears in her eyes. Holy cow! She must have been worried. She didn’t even cry at
Gone With the Wind
. “I told you to get more sleep.”

I tried to follow this new line of logic. “I fell asleep?”

“Don’t you remember? You were on Mulholland Highway. And—” Her attention shifted away. “Oh, Lieutenant,” she said and straightened. “Hello.”

My gaze skipped past the bumps my feet made in the white coverlet. Lieutenant Rivera stood directly between them, looking dark and lean and carrying a good-sized parcel.

“What are you doing here?” Maybe it wasn’t the most polite salutation, but I was still struggling to separate the memory of chicken fried rice from screeching tires and didn’t want to have to worry about the condition of my coiffure. I stifled a weakling urge to run my hand over my hair. For all I knew someone might have shaved the Lions logo into the back of my scalp but there wasn’t much I could do about it at that precise moment.

“What happened?” he asked.

Elaine was staring at him, but he kept his eyes on me, which made me wonder in a dim sort of otherworldly way if I was hallucinating. Everyone looks at Elaine.

“I think I might have had a car accident,” I said.

“Don’t be a smart-ass. What happened?”

I scowled. I was tired and hungry and didn’t really need the fifth degree from a guy who wouldn’t have sex with me just because I was drunk off my feet. Okay, I’d been a little weepy, too . . . and in his eyes there was probably still the possibility that I was a murderer, but still . . . “You tell me,” I said. I was trying for tough, but I might have just sounded cranky.

“I know you think my position on the force gives me omnipotent powers,” he said and took another couple steps into the room. His tone was still rough-edged, but there was something almost gooshy in his eyes. Maybe he’d called my mother, too. The thought made me feel a little sick to my stomach. “But I’m a cop, not God.”

“I’ll try to remember,” I said and noticed that the box he carried said Frank’s Garden Store and had a green plastic bag protruding from the top. “Did you bring me flowers?”

“I heard they’d brought you here.”

I think I blinked at him dumbly. “And you came anyway?”

His lips jumped a little and maybe his eyes laughed as he relaxed. “Yeah. I came,” he said. His gaze was steady on me as he stepped closer. It made me feel fidgety and a little breathless. “What the hell were you doing in the mountains?”