Fidelity (8 page)

Late in the evening, Ray happened to be out in a corridor with a group of people, and everyone seemed to go off to get a fresh drink at the same time except Ray and Emily Kramer. She was a woman who didn’t wear much makeup or bother with hair and clothes during the day. For years she had been a housewife and the mother of a son who needed to be driven to practice for some sport every day. But that night she had worn a red dress with a low neckline and made of a fabric that clung to her a bit more than she probably knew. She placed her hand on Ray Hall’s forearm. Her hand felt light, almost as though he were imagining her. But she blocked his way, stood close, and looked up into his eyes. “Tell me, Ray. I need the truth. Is Phil cheating on me?”

Hall’s mind stalled. He had liked Emily Kramer since the day he first saw her. She always seemed so alert and quick, and it was fun to hear her talk. But it was her physical grace and the shape of her body that made it hard for him to look away from her, even when he knew he was taking a risk to look. And he knew that she thought about him, too. He couldn’t be sure of the nature of her thoughts because there was always some wishful thinking in his mind, and friendships between men and women always incorporated some slight sexual attraction, but he was sure she felt something extra for him.

Asking him whether her husband was cheating told him so much that he couldn’t examine all of the new information at once. She was revealing to Ray that things weren’t going well between her and Phil, and that she trusted Ray not to betray her confidence to anyone. She trusted him not to think unflattering thoughts about her for her indiscretion in asking, or for her inability to keep a husband interested in her. She was implying that she was so close to Ray that he would tell her the truth just because she asked not to be spared. And he sensed without being able to analyze it, that if the answer was yes, then she would find a way to sleep with him tonight. But he knew it would be out of anger at Phil, not a desire for Ray Hall. In the years since then, he had thought about that moment a thousand times.

After a second, he gave her a wry, amused grin. “Jesus Christ, Emily. Look at you. How could he be cheating?”

But the hand she had placed on his arm tightened, so he was afraid he would spill his drink and draw attention to them. She said, “I really need to know, Ray. It matters.”

“I don’t know.” It was the only answer that didn’t need to be defended or shored up with evidence.

Emily stared at him. Maybe she already knew that regardless of what the truth was, he could never tell her Phil was cheating. She held his arm for a few more seconds, said, “Thanks, Ray,” turned and joined the group in the main office. Ten minutes later, he went to find her, but found out that she and Phil had both left. Whether they left together or apart he never knew, because she had arrived in her own car after the office closed to bring some of the refreshments.

Now Phil was dead, and Ray Hall was the one Emily had asked to find out what had happened to him. He held up his glass and looked at the amber liquid inside, thought about the peculiar beauty of the whiskey with the light behind it, and then set the glass down on the bar. He took out a twenty-dollar bill, slipped it under the glass, and walked out of the restaurant into the sunshine.

He had left his car parked along the street. As he approached it, a woman got out of the car parked at the curb ahead of his: Emily Kramer. She leaned on the door of his car, her arms folded, until he was beside her. “Hi, Ray.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I was in the bar. You caught me.” He took out his car keys.

She didn’t move. “You could tell me a soothing lie. You were interviewing somebody. I’d accept it even now.”

“That’s probably why I won’t lie to you.”

She looked up the block, then behind her. “Have you got anything at all yet?”

“I talked to Gruenthal, the lead homicide detective, a little while ago. He had the autopsy report and the crime-scene stuff.”

“I don’t want to stand around in the middle of the street while we do this. Why don’t you take me for a ride?”

“Okay.” He pressed the button on his key chain to unlock the doors, then hesitated. “I’ve been drinking.”

“I’m aware of that. You want me to drive?”

“No. I just thought I should say it.”

“Thank you.” She slid into the passenger seat and closed the door.

He got in and drove north up Van Nuys Boulevard. “It pretty much agrees with what we heard before. It was after one A.M. Phil was walking up the sidewalk on Shoshone Street two blocks north of Victory. His car was parked on a dark, quiet stretch. He opened the door of his car, the dome light came on, and he got behind the wheel. There was a van parked across the street. Knowing Phil, I think he probably noticed the van parked in that spot when he arrived, and nothing about it looked different, so he figured it was harmless. But the shooter had broken into the van, hidden inside, and waited for him. The only shot hit Phil through the head, so he never felt it.”

“You don’t need to do that,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Tell me things to make me feel better about how he died. I need to know what he was doing there when he was shot.”

CCUy?”

“A million reasons. I’m Phil’s wife-his widow. I loved him. And I owe him that. Everybody has a right to have somebody care at least that much when he dies. He has a right to have somebody ask questions-who did this to him and why they would want to.”

“What else?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said there were a million reasons.”

“I didn’t say I was going to tell you all of them.”

Hall drove a block in silence. “He was up there north of Victory around one, but so far nobody knows what he was working on. It’s a residential street, but there are big apartment buildings on Victory. There’s also a golf course, a couple of good-sized schoolyards, and Balboa Park, all good places to meet somebody at night.”

“You don’t think he was out meeting an informant. You think it was a woman, don’t you?”

He took a deep breath, then blew it out slowly. “I haven’t said that. Is that what this is about?”

“Come on, Ray. How can it not be about that? My husband was shot to death in an ambush on a residential street at one A.M. I’ve looked at every case file I could find, and I don’t see a current case that had anything to do with Shoshone Street. I don’t see anything in anybody’s Rolodex or on anybody’s computer that would send him up there. Do you?”

“Not so far.”

“Have you found anything that would tell you that he was working on a case at all?”

“Not yet. How about you? Have you searched your house?”

“Of course I have. Knowing Phil, I thought he would have left something where I would be sure to find it-maybe with the papers you have to look at when a person dies. I looked everywhere, but there’s nothing so far-no addresses near where they found him, no mysterious phone numbers, nothing. Now I’m looking for hiding places.”

“What about the cars?”

“I checked mine. The reason the police still have Phil’s is that they’re checking it.”

“I still haven’t figured out why Phil was keeping this a secret,” Ray said.

“Because he had something big to hide. Now take me back to my car. We both have work to do.”

Jerry Hobart climbed the slope toward the plateau above the trailer park with Valerie. He looked back down toward the freeway. From up here he could see the long sprawl of modern buildings that made up the outlet malls, and beside the freeway entrance, the small greenand-white box of the Hadley Date Farms store that had been here when Hobart was born. In the other direction was the high, narrow building of the Morongo Casino Resort that the Indians had built. Beyond the buildings was the gray line of freeway that stretched from the beach in Santa Monica across the whole country to the beach in Jacksonville, Florida. They reached the plateau and walked for a few minutes.

Valerie said, “What happened to that guy you were working with last time I saw you? That Whitley guy?”

Hobart walked on for a few steps, climbing higher. “He didn’t work out, so we went our separate ways.”

“When did you split up with him?”

“Not long ago. A week or two. Why?”

“I was just curious, I guess,” she said. “I don’t see you all that often, and I like to keep current. Sometimes I make predictions. I didn’t like him much, and I was wondering how long it would take you to decide you didn’t, either.”

Hobart said, “He was a pretty good salesman because he was a talker, I’ll give him that. People would start out thinking twenty bucks was a lot for a string of lightbulbs, but after a while they were thinking that twenty was damned cheap for getting him to stop talking and go away. The lightbulbs made a nice bonus.”

Valerie gave the laugh she often gave as a comment, just “Huh!” once. When Hobart was away from her, even for a long time, he could always hear that laugh. When he closed his eyes at night and tried to picture her, he would see her begin to smile, then hear the laugh, the bright blue eyes wide and her mouth open just a little to show her perfect white top teeth. When they were young, Valerie’s teeth weren’t so good. He remembered them as small and oddly spaced. But in her twenties, while Hobart was in jail, she’d had them capped so they looked like a movie star’s teeth.

He had assumed that she would probably get married to somebody else while he was in jail, and thinking about it every day in his cell was part of his punishment. Instead, she had spent a lot of effort making herself look better and a lot of time driving east to Phoenix or west to Los Angeles with a couple of girlfriends, or at least that was her story. Probably she’d had a lot of boyfriends, but there wasn’t much he could do about it, then or now. She’d had the right to do whatever she pleased, and probably she had.

Sometimes she made vague remarks to hurt him. Once she said she was a whore with an expired “sell by” date on her. That was a couple of years ago. It was late in the evening when he was feeling sentimental about her, and he felt as though he had been stabbed. He hurt so much that he became enraged, looked at his watch, made a transparent excuse about a plane he had to catch, and left. He had done that to make her think he was lying and had a date with someone else. They had loved each other for so long that they knew the best ways to wound each other. She was smart enough to know that she could make him crazy by reminding him that she’d had sex with other men-probably more than a few of them. But she also seemed to fear that if she mentioned a name, she would learn later that the man had died suddenly. It had happened once, about ten years ago. Afterward, he had not wanted her to hear that the man was dead and get a feeling of undeserved power-that she could just say a name and the man would die-so he had made sure he didn’t come to see her for a long time. After six months, he had a postal service print up some cards that said he had a new cell-phone number, and sent one to her as though she were on a long mailing list. Since then, when she was in the mood to punish him for what happened to their lives when he went to jail, she would just imply that there had been other men. What she was implying was that the experiences had not been good-that they had ruined her-and that she considered every one of them his fault.

They walked for a half hour or more without talking, going up into the hills where other people seldom went, and they couldn’t see Interstate 10 or the buildings that had been built beside it. They walked with the scorching stones under their feet, the sun blasting over their heads and the wind moving out of the east across the desert keeping them dry. The wind was constant out here, so there were big wind farms just down the interstate with huge white windmills with propellers that looked like airplane parts, spinning together, pivoting a little when the wind shifted.

The silence was part of the etiquette of walking together in the desert. They walked and thought about basic things. It wasn’t a time to chatter about how the washing machine needed to get fixed or the damned government was getting worse or the car sounded funny. When they were together up here, they thought about each other and about themselves, and maybe a little about the other times up here over the years, and how it felt to be back.

Hobart’s phone gave its irritating musical tone, and he looked at Valerie and frowned. She was watching him as she walked, waiting to see what he was going to do. He turned the phone off and put it back into his shirt pocket without looking at the number.

They walked on, but the feeling was not the same after that. He knew she was thinking that he had violated the rules by carrying a cell phone out there. She was thinking he had turned it off, not to preserve the open connection between them, but to hide a call from somebody he couldn’t talk to in front of her. She was thinking it was a woman.

Hobart could see her shock hardening into resentment. This was deeper than the anger she felt when she tightened her jaw. When she was like this, the muscles around her mouth went slack again, so her face flattened. Turning off the phone had not restored the sanctity of their walk in the desert. Now all she was thinking about was that Hobart had a secret from her. He had another life away from hereaway from her. Once the telephone had dragged her attention away from being with him, she could only think about the fact that he was away most of the time, and that when he was, there certainly were things he did that he never told her. He had to get rid of the telephone issue. He said, “Hold up a minute.”

She stopped about ten feet away from him, halfturned and pretended to look toward something miles away, but held him in the corner of her eye.

He made sure she saw he wasn’t punching in a new number, or using the navigation button to find a stored number. He just pushed the button for a missed call, so the phone would return it.

She didn’t have to pretend she wasn’t listening, and couldn’t have, anyway. There were no other sounds she could pretend to be listening to. Even the wind was mild and steady.

“Hello,” he said. “You called me.” He listened for a few seconds, looking at the ground and moving small pieces of gravel around with his boot. “All right. Same price as last time.” He listened again. “I don’t bargain or give discounts. If you don’t want to make that deal, it’s up to you.” He listened again. “Okay. Then I’ll take care of it. Good-bye.” He turned off the phone and put it away, and then began to walk toward Valerie.