The Manipulated (Joe Portugal Mysteries) (31 page)

Eric Stahl continued at
Protect and Serve
. One morning in January a very large man materialized in his office and told him that if he ever went near Ronnie again, or if he ever even thought about using anything other than his natural charm to get a woman in bed with him, his two boys would be short both a mother and a father.

I owed John Santini one again, and I wasn’t too surprised to find that it didn’t bother me very much. Part Two of
The Life of Joe
was beginning, and I had a feeling that John—as I found myself thinking of him—was going to be of as much use to me as I was to him.

I’d never gotten around to dealing with the last person who’d let me down. I talked to him on the phone a few times, but sometimes you need to see a person’s face, and as the days grew longer and warmer I never got to do that. As with so many things, the more time went by, the less important it became. Maybe I’d deal with it someday. Maybe I wouldn’t.

It was early on a Sunday evening. We were at the tail end of a barbecue in my back yard. My father was there with his new bride Mary Elizabeth, Elaine and Wayne and their kids, Frampton Washington and his family, now officially including Aricela. Theta was there, but Ronnie’d gone away for the weekend with a hunky actor she met at a screening.

The doorbell rang. Gina got up and went through the house to get it. She came back and told me to go inside. Mike Lennox was there. His hair poked out in odd directions, bringing memories of the day after his son was killed. His face was pale and the collar of his shirt was tucked under on one side.

I knew why he was there. That low-grade telepathy again. But I waited for him to speak.

“She’s dead,” he said.

When he got off the phone with the embassy in Beijing, he wept, and when he was done with that he decided to kill himself. He got as far as finding the gun he’d bought for “protection” ten years back and never used. Then he decided killing himself would stain Donna’s memory, and he knew he needed help. Lu had moved up to live with her kids in San Francisco. None of his Venice crew fit the bill. That left me. He looked up my number, called it five, six, seven times over the course of an hour. Finally he drove over. Later, we found the phone in Gina’s office, our old bedroom, off the hook. One of the kids must have knocked it off.

“What’d they say?” I asked. “The embassy people.”

“They found her bones.”

“Jeez, Mike, I’m sorry.”

“Some whack job, hundred miles from where she disappeared. You don’t think of serial killers in China, do you?”

“No.”

“Had nine or ten of ’em buried in his back yard. They figured out a few so far. All Chinese except Donna.”

“Dental records?”

“Yeah. The embassy’s had ’em the whole time. They found the bones three, four days ago.”

“And they’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

“Hey, man, I’m sorry.”

“Thanks, man. Funny. This happened a few months ago, I wouldn’t have had you trying to find—”

Did he really think I didn’t know the whole thing with the woman at Staples Center was a sham?

Did it even matter that it was?

“No big deal,” I said. “I was happy to do it. What can I do now?”

“Take a ride with me.”

His Mustang was parked at the curb. “I’ll drive,” I said.

“Probably better.” He handed over the keys, I adjusted the seat, we took off.

I got us to Pacific Coast Highway, where we could watch the sun setting to our left. Pink light suffused the sky and the ocean turned greenish black. Mike made a cigarette appear, smoked it down, tossed the butt out the window. He talked about Donna. About Dennis too, but mostly about Donna. It was her eulogy.

We drove to Zuma Beach. He dredged up a couple of blankets from the trunk and we trekked out onto the sand. Mike kept talking nonstop; then after an hour, when the sky was black and the stars were shining, he suddenly shut up. I sat there, wishing I had a jacket.

Eventually he said, “Remember at Staples when I went running after—”

“Let’s not talk about that.”

“But I need you to know. There wasn’t—”

“I know. Just shut up about it, all right? I know all about it.”

“And you didn’t—”

“I said shut up, okay?”

Neither of us said anything for a long time. Down the beach someone had a boombox, and they were playing one of the countless Rolling Stones greatest-hits collections. “She’s a Rainbow” came on, and Mike started singing along. I joined in, and we stumbled through to the end. We were laughing at the finish. Something had broken free.

We talked about everything and nothing. Mostly war stories, about music and drugs and insane road trips with birdbrained companions. I recounted that long-ago morning at Pyramid Lake with Sarah and Tony, and when I mentioned mescaline he launched into a story about when he was in college and he and a couple of friends piled into an old Renault and drove two hundred miles to score some, ending up spending the night on the floor of an apartment in New Paltz, New York, with a chick who blew two of them and fell asleep working on the third. I asked his place in the sequence. He said, “A gentleman never tells.”

We wrapped our blankets around us and sat there all night, one or the other occasionally wandering away in search of a place to take a leak. Then suddenly, as the sky began to brighten at our backs, he returned to Donna. He said a lot of the same things he’d said the night before. Somewhere along the line I realized he was crying.

I remembered Pyramid Lake, and how good it felt when Sarah put her arm around me. My blanket and I inched over, and I wrapped him up, and we sat like that until the first sliver of sunlight brightened the sand.

My sincere thanks:

To Jim Pascoe and Tom Fassbender, for letting Joe continue his detective act, and for their excellent comments on the first draft.

To Maryelizabeth Hart, who inspired “But I was purple.”

To Olivia Bell, Brian Festerling, Michelle Fitzpatrick, Kristen Isaacson, Annie Thayer Jacquelin, Lisa Manterfield, Latrice McGlothin, Michelle Menna, Clay Norman, Stephanie Rausch, and Tricia Urbano Voltz, my day job colleagues, for all the laughs, and for providing excellent fodder for character names.

To Andrea Cohen, my wife, for everything.

Finally, I want to thank William Relling Jr., to whose memory this book is dedicated. Bill was my first writing teacher, and the one from whom I learned the most, including the greatest of all tips: kill your darlings. Bill’s blue pencil struck countless darlings from my early stories and attempts at novels, and my writing is very much the better for it. He was gone much too soon, and I miss him greatly.