Beware Beware (11 page)

“Yes. Always home.”

“Can I stop by? I'll bring you lunch or something.”

“Sure.” I couldn't tell if she was deflated or just tired, but her voice sagged. “I'd like that.”

Half an hour later I was at her place on Kings Road with two turkey sandwiches in a take-out bag.

Jackie came to the door with a finger to her lips. Her face looked pale and unrested, but she smiled when she saw me. “She's sleeping,” she said quietly. There was a note of mischief in her voice, as if she were getting away with something, as if I might help her.

She'd lost weight since I'd seen her last. It didn't surprise me—even nine months pregnant, she'd made a point of hitting the gym. She'd gained the recommended amount of baby weight and not a pound more, and now she was almost thin and insubstantial, the fatigue fuming off of her like cold air from a ghost.

I'd dropped by like this on the day Diego died, and I still thought sometimes that he must be coming back. Jackie had installed a nursery, but otherwise, the apartment was unchanged. She could have moved easily—she didn't. She slept in the bed they'd shared, with the same art on the walls. Even his clothes stayed hanging in the closet.

He haunted the place, but only in whiffs until the baby came along. I wondered what that was like for Jackie, spending every minute attending to the child Diego had left behind. I wasn't brave enough to ask.

The baby gave us plenty of material for small talk as we ate lunch. Jackie told me about her nursing schedule, and about the stream of friends and family who had come to help out and visit. When we were done eating, she asked about my job.

“Actually, that's why I'm here.” I knew as soon as I said it that this was a half-truth. I also knew that I needed it to feel comfortable. “I need a lawyer.”

With Diego gone, Jackie was the one attorney I knew. She worked for the ACLU, and I thought chances were good she might know a decent criminal defense lawyer. “Oh no,” she said. “Why?”

“I have a client who's in a bit of trouble. He's being investigated by the police and it might just be a matter of time before he's arrested.”

“For what?”

“Murder.” I took a sip of water and mumbled into the glass. “For what it's worth, I think he's innocent.”

“Murder? How?”

“It's a long story,” I said. “I shouldn't get into it.”

“Is everything all right with you?” She gave me a hard look, and I strained under it like a pinned bug.

“Yeah. It's fine. It's just work.”

“I can give you a couple names and numbers,” she said. And just like that, her phone was out and she was sending me an e-mail. My phone made a little noise and I forwarded the message to Jamie and Daphne with a short note.

“Thanks,” I said. “I'll make you coffee or something.”

“Are you saying I look tired?”

I shrugged, and she smiled.

“I'm about to collapse, honestly, but the coffee won't help.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's some decaf organic crap that won't make me a bad mother.”

“Do you want some anyway? Maybe you'll get a little placebo effect.”

I made us coffee and we sat in companionable silence scattered with languid plops of conversation. At one point, she fell asleep, her lips parted and her neck bent back. When the baby started to cry, she jolted awake with a flustered, snuffling sound.

“I can hold her or something if you want,” I said. “You look pretty comfortable.”

“No. It's okay.” She stood up with an athletic burst I hadn't expected. There was a knee-jerk defensiveness to her reaction that seemed to freeze the room. She felt it, and so added, “She won't shut up unless I go to her. But you can say hi.”

I followed Jackie into the infant's lair, where Cristina lay on her back, mewling in her crib. She'd grown, of course, but she looked, as ever, like Diego's child. The thought of him filled me with the familiar sadness, and I wondered if I had any right to touch Cristina, this girl who would grow up fatherless as a direct result of my actions.

“She got bigger,” I said stupidly.

“Doctor says she's twenty-fifth percentile in height, seventy-fifth percentile in weight.”

I wiped a tear from the side of my eye and smiled. “Babies are supposed to be fat.”

“I don't know,” she said, with a mock grimace. “What kind were you?”

“I was skinny and I looked mean. No one thought I was cute.”

She laughed and paced around the room, patting Cristina on the back. When the baby fell back asleep, I gave Jackie a hug and left.

 

Seven

I jogged my phone to check the time and found a text message waiting on my screen. “Yo its thor. Can u talk?”

I texted him back immediately, and was gratified to find he was more or less waiting by his phone. He was home, he said, and told me to swing by. He gave me an address on the Venice Beach boardwalk. He didn't ask a single question.

I drove across town with swift purpose, skimming through light, scattered Sunday traffic. It took a good half hour anyway, and I kept the radio off and plowed into thought. I spent most of the ride feeling sorry for Theodore Tilley. Over six months had passed since my best friend was murdered, and there wasn't a day that went by without the pain of that loss squeezing me for breath. Theodore and his father may not have been close, but the shock and injustice of murder tended to amplify grief. I knew I had no words to console him, but I practiced them anyway. I even teared up for a bit, but I got my sympathies under control by the time I made it to the beach.

Back in the day, Venice Beach earned the slick name of the “Slum by the Sea,” and I always thought of that phrase whenever I came through. It wasn't a slum anymore, but it wasn't exactly a sparkling beach town. The Boardwalk was its most salient landmark, a crowded, colorful stripe of pathway just inches from sand and ocean. It was an institution of sorts, an eccentric cultural center characterized by the so-called “street”—street artists, street performers, and street ballers all found their stations amid the cheerful grime and noise of the Westside's dingy promenade.

I parked in a public lot and walked through a dense portion of boardwalk to get to Theodore Tilley's address. Venice was a long, arduous drive from Echo Park, and I realized I hadn't come anywhere near a beach in a couple of years. I remembered the last time, a full day's outing with friends since departed. I tried, unsuccessfully, to put that out of my mind.

The ocean rolled beyond a smattering of surfers and Sunday beachgoers, a few of them glistening in swimsuits despite the chill of early March. I gazed out at the water, my thoughts reaching into the past, and almost tripped on an unsupervised toddler. His mother came running and yelled at the child in Spanish, sending an angry glance and a muttered string of language my way. I shook my head and walked on, looking straight ahead. The Boardwalk required concentration. Rollerbladers whooshed by, and pedestrians weaved in illogical directions. Artists and craft vendors sat on both sides of the path, building statues of sand and hocking jewelry made of soda-can tabs and seashells. A white man with dreadlocks rang a bell outside a pot dispensary, shouting, “The doctor is in!” I wondered how many of the people I passed knew about the murder of Joe Tilley. I remembered when Michael Jackson died, sharing an elevator with a man I'd never know, who whistled the tune to “Billie Jean.” In my direct dealing with Tilley's death, I'd almost forgotten that it was a public event. And now, as I prepared to meet his son, I thought about the millions of people who shared tiny shreds of that private grief.

It would have been nice for Jamie if Theodore Tilley were on the lam. Instead, he was smoking pot on the couch in his beachfront condo. He was wearing basketball shorts with nothing on top, and his six-pack seemed to smile at passersby. I stopped in front of his address and saw him through the glass wall, where he sat in full view of anyone bothering to look. I gathered that his address wasn't public, and that his face was not widely known. That would change if he was the perpetrator of the patricide of the year. He didn't look like a murderer, but he didn't look like the son of a newly murdered father either.

I dialed his number and saw him stare at the cell phone on one arm of his couch. He set his pipe down on a coffee table and reached for the phone.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I'm right outside. Korean lady, blue button-down shirt.”

I waved and he waved back. “One sec,” he said.

He disappeared from view and when he came out he was wearing a ribbed black tank top that clung to his musculature. Better than nothing, anyway, for an interview in his bachelor pad.

“Hi,” he said. “I'm Thor.”

“Right, Thortilla.”

“No, Thor Tilla. Like Ghostface Killah?”

“I'm Song,” I said. “Nice to meet you.”

Theodore Tilley was a handsome boy with none of the powerful magnetic quality of his father. He might have stood out in a bar, but he would have blended in with any assortment of good-looking faces. He had his dad's strong jaw and a nice pair of blue eyes rimmed dark with lashes. He was on the short side, about my height with the spike in his hair, and his biceps were stiff and wide as melons, inked up and down with hard-to-read words in terrible fonts.

“What's that say?” I asked about a prominent line of text on his right arm.

“
Dulce et decorum est
,” he said. “It's from one of my dad's movies. It's Latin.”

“War movie?”

“Yeah,
The Trenches
. Did you see it? He only had a small part, actually.”

“No.”

“Wow, then how'd you know?”

I shrugged. “Lucky guess.”

He led the way into the condo, which was much bigger than I'd thought from outside. It was a beautiful place, spacious and modern with enviable views. The décor was straight Crate&Barrel, and I had no doubt that an interior decorator was well paid for the job. The effect was somewhat dampened by the mess of dirty plates and discarded clothing strewn across floor and furniture. Everything reeked of weed.

He gestured toward the couch and I took a seat. I looked out at the pedestrians on the boardwalk and felt oddly self-conscious, like I was taking the stage. Still, it wasn't a bad place to see a man about a murder.

“Nice house,” I said. “It's just you here?”

“Yeah. My dad gave it to me when I turned twenty-one.”

“Not bad.”

His eyes were red and they turned redder still before filling with tears. The change was sudden, but I'd been too eager to miss the signs of grief before.

“I'm sorry about your dad,” I said, feeling somewhat chastised. “Why are you alone here? Where's your mom?”

“She's coming. I couldn't reach her until yesterday, and she's coming from Thailand, so…”

“Do you have friends coming by?”

“I'm okay. I got girls in and out.” He picked up his pipe. “Do you want some?”

“No, but do you mind if I smoke a cigarette?”

“Sure.”

We lit up and sat for a while, smoking in silence. The weed visibly relaxed him, and he sat slumped against the couch, looking blank and a little bit dazed.

“How are you holding up?” I asked after a while.

He shrugged. “My dad got whacked, so…”

“Were you close?”

“Yeah, we were close. I'm his only son, what do you think?” He spoke rapidly, with a bit of an edge, and I saw him hear his own voice before breaking into a weird guffaw. “Maybe ‘close' isn't right.”

“But you loved him.”

“Worshipped, is more like it.”

“I wish I had a dad,” I said. “I was so young when mine died, I barely remember him. I can picture his face, but it's this static face, and I'm pretty sure I nabbed it from a photo.”

I hadn't longed for a father since I was pretty young, but I had enough true sentiment to magnify into common ground.

“Half the time I think about my dad, I see him as one of his characters, or I put him in clothes he was wearing in a magazine.” He shook his head. “It's messed up, but I'm pretty sure he didn't think about me.”

My knee-jerk thought was to tell him that wasn't true, but I kept my mouth shut. Jamie had conceded that Joe was a terrible father, and I saw that what Theodore said was possible, and that I had no grounds to refute it.

“How well did you know him?” I asked instead.

“Better than you did, probably.”

“What was he like?”

“Want to hear my favorite story?”

“Sure.”

“He took me to Disneyland for my eighth birthday. It was one of the happiest days of my life. We rode everything I wanted, and he let me hold his hand. I hadn't seen him in a while. Don't know how long, but I feel like I must've been younger. 'Cause this was the first time I noticed how people stared at him.”

“When did you figure out your dad was famous?”

“Before, I guess, but I didn't know what that meant. But that Disneyland day, I saw everyone looking at us, and I remember feeling really proud, like everyone was at Disneyland to see us or something. Goofy asked for his autograph, and all the princesses smiled at us.”

“I'm sure that made an impression.”

“Yeah, no shit. My dad was more famous than Mickey Mouse. We didn't wait in any lines, and I strutted around that theme park all day. But then he met this lady,” he said. “She was gorgeous, even prettier than the princesses.”

“Ah,” I said. “What happened?”

“Dad was buying me a Goofy hat, and there were these three women trying on Minnie ears nearby. At the time I thought they were real adults but I bet they were twenty-two, tops. They were giggling and taking pictures, and at some point they noticed my dad and stopped talking. He walked over and started talking to them, and after a minute I could tell he was just talking to the blond one.” He shook his head and continued. “And then he came over to me and said he was going to ride Splash Mountain with the nice lady, and that the other nice ladies would buy me ice cream. I looked over and saw the blond one talking to her friends. One was giggling and the other one was rolling her eyes.”