Tancarro was staring at my feet. He was looking at his gun, trying to decide if he could handle both. But he wasn’t about to give her the weapon.
What did that mean? My eyes were swelling shut. My head throbbed so hard the room bounced.
“Go on! Dammit, Pernell, what’re you doing—waiting, as usual?”
Ignore the pounding. Focus! What was going on with these two? No. No time to figure it out. I needed to startle them, jolt them off their track.
He turned toward her. “If you—”
Now or never! “Hey!” I snapped. “You can’t kill me. You’re on the Arts Commission!”
He stared incredulously, frozen for the moment. I clambered up. I had to lock my gaze onto something that wouldn’t move—the armchair. Even so, a wave of nausea almost floored me.
“Sit down! Or he will shoot you now!” Gabriella yelled.
I longed to sink into one of the armchairs, let my head rest against its soft back. Like Ryan? Did he—But no. They hadn’t killed him in here; there’d have been too much blood.
They didn’t kill him in
this room,
but they did kill him. My chances—
Forget that! Focus on this moment. Right now, I needed to watch them both. I swung onto the bench of a spinet, landing hard, sending a new wave of misery through my head and stomach. But I kept my attention on them. Suddenly, I really was letting my thoughts and fears go, as I’d done sitting zazen. I was aware of the icy air, the stale smell, of myself, of them, of our connection. I was alert, waiting for my chance. Willing my eyes open, I stared at Gabriella and said, “Is this where Ryan Hammond sat before you killed him?”
Her gaze darted toward the hallway and back. “You’re not—”
“—in a position to bargain? Au contraire. I am Ryan Hammond’s girlfriend. I’m the one who knew he came here, remember? Why do you think I felt confident enough to knock on your door?”
“You’re a fool,” she said.
“Enough!” He hit the gun on a metal bowl. She jumped back. My head just about exploded. “Forget it, Gabi. We’re not bargaining. Let’s just get this over with. And you,” he said to me, “get—”
“Gabi!” I said, “Where
is
Damon? Your brother? Goddammit, where is he?” My voice was loud, but their silence was way louder. They stared at each other, her dead pale, him with his jaw clenched, knuckles white against the gun butt.
“Where did he go?” I insisted. “Where
is
he? Did you break through the wall to the fireplace? Did you call the fire department? The police? What did you do?”
They looked like they couldn’t speak.
“You did something!” I insisted.
They seemed frozen.
“You had to do something!”
Omigod! They’d left him there in the walled-in fireplace!
Suddenly I was shaking so hard I almost slipped off the bench. “The police!” There had to be an explanation. Some
other
explanation. I was grasping at straws. “You called the police. The guys heard the sirens while they were on the roof. That’s why they scattered. You told me that, Pernell. Kilmurray told me. Didn’t the police search the roof?”
“I thought”—her voice was almost inaudible—“I thought . . . the boys were gone. The police . . . came and . . . left.”
“But they were here! Why didn’t you have them check the roof? What harm—” She gasped.
But I knew the answer only too well. “The family! You didn’t want it to become public that your brother was trying to break in. You didn’t want to hurt the family. Of course, you
couldn’t
hurt the family. How could you do that to your parents when they trusted you?”
Tancarro jolted toward me, but Gabriella’s cry stopped him. I’d hit the mark with her.
I should have left it there, with her stunned, but I couldn’t. I had to ask, “But after, you must’ve heard him in there? He must’ve yelled, pounded. You had to’ve heard him.”
“No!
No!
I left. The house shook. I thought he’d dropped something down there. I didn’t know what. I didn’t think it was him, that he’d done something so crazy, even him. I thought he’d dropped a stink bomb or something. Something that would smell up the house. I was furious. I was scared. I’d had enough of him. I had to get out of here. I couldn’t sleep here.” She was staring at me, suddenly begging me to understand.
I nodded. “So you went to a hotel?”
“No, I slept in my office that night and the next night, too. And then the earthquake and I—I got sidetracked . . . Damon and his stupid prank. I never would have—” Gabriella seemed to shrink inside her heavy, ill-matched clothes. I tried to picture her as Pernell Tancarro had described her back then—an up-and-coming attorney, racing to court in an expensive dark suit and Italian high heels, a properly weathered leather briefcase slapping against her leg.
Twenty-one years ago. She’d spent twenty-one years in this house, slowly coming to suspect, and then knowing, her brother had died right there in the chimney he couldn’t get out of. Where she had left him to die.
How had she lived with herself? How had she lived
here?
I thought of the guy I’d been near to loving that last day we’d been on the pier in Oakland. Him insisting he’d done the unforgivable, me unable to believe that, not of him. I’d buried my face in his chest, pulled him tight to me, and felt him shaking. He’d said, “I let him die . . . I walked away.” I flashed on those chimneys he built in the desert, each more confining than the last. I could almost feel his dread as he lowered himself down inside, trying time after time to make himself stay, to experience even a bit of what he’d abandoned Damon Guthrie to. Each time scrambling out in panic.
I looked at Tancarro. “Why didn’t Damon climb out?”
All the color was gone from his face. “Maybe the rope wasn’t secured. It must have slipped in after him. He fell; he hit his head. He never came to at all.”
No way you could have known. That’s the story you made up to stave off the horror. So you don’t have to think of your friend dying slowly in the dark.
How soon did you get it? I wanted to ask. Did you wonder about
him when he was coming to realize he was trapped? That time after time he must have tried to climb out and slid back down? When his legs gave out? When he clawed the bricks, screaming silently with his throat dry, his voice gone?
“Enough!” He motioned with the gun. “Walk!”
Slowly, I pushed myself up. My head nearly exploded.
“Move! There, across the entryway. Gabi, get the door.”
Keeping her distance, she stepped around me and wrenched it open. The smell astonished me. It wasn’t decay—not what I’d thought—but mold. All I could see through the doorway was boxes and dark-splattered papers piled, scattered, heaped higher than my head, filling a room twice the size of what she now used for her living room. A wall of paper sealing off the fireplace and her brother’s body. I turned to Gabriella, stunned.
“Don’t look at me like that! I had to live here, in this house, with him because he did that stupid, stupid, greedy thing! Him and his stupid friends and their stupid little plot. He was coming to steal from me. He died. It was his own doing. Not mine. But I’m stuck. I can’t leave with him in there. I might as well be dead, too. And then he—your boyfriend—shows up—”
“You didn’t have to kill him! He agonized over your brother. Why would he tell anyone?”
It was Tancarro who replied. “Maybe he wouldn’t. But maybe he would. I couldn’t take the chance. I’ve been chained to this place for twenty years. I’ve done my time. After all this, I’m damned well not going to jail. And I’m not spending the rest of my life worrying about it.”
He shoved me into that awful room. My feet skidded on papers. I twisted, grabbed a box, and flung it at him. Then I lunged for his legs and
brought him down hard. His head smacked the floor. The gun slid free. Gabriella lunged for it, but I scooped it up before her hands hit the floor.
“Move and I’ll shoot.”
They didn’t doubt me.
34
THE PREVIOUS NIGHT now seemed like a blur of flashing lights and police giving orders and racing around. I’d refused medical care—my head ached but I was damned sure it would ache a lot more if I was forced to spend hours in an ER. So, I’d ended up accepting police hospitality instead. And even with my brother Gary’s help, I hadn’t made it out of there till two in the morning.
When he finally dropped me off at the zendo, instead of going inside, I waited till he drove off. Then I walked slowly to the corner. I felt the damp, fresh, night air on my face and breathed in a faint garlicky aroma of tomato sauce, along with the exhaust fumes from a passing car and the sweetly rancid stench of garbage. Each of these familiar odors couldn’t help but remind me of the great boon of just being alive. I wasn’t thinking about Damon Guthrie in that chimney—but I wasn’t
not
, either.
When I did go back to my room above the zendo, Leo’s door was open. As if it were mid-afternoon instead of the middle of the night, he was sitting cross-legged on his futon reading what appeared to be an obscure Asian text printed on rice paper. It crackled as he turned the page. He was, of course, waiting up for me. I almost hugged him. I tried, but it’s impossible to get your arms around a guy in that position without both of you ending up laughing. And I was even gladder about that. I put my hands
together and bowed to him and he met my bow. Then I stepped into my room and flopped down on my futon and slept till noon.
When I finally got up, Leo was reading a different book. “Renzo’s expecting us. Want to head out?”
“Great. I’m starving.”
Then he added, “Various members of your family called. I told them you were asleep. They all said, ‘No rush.’”
“Thanks.” I was in no hurry either. They’d be relieved I was okay. They’d mask impatience while I rattled on about how now I understood why Gabriella didn’t dare heat her house, why Guthrie/Ryan looked so good for a guy his supposed age—because Ryan was so much younger. They’d be polite as long as they could, but what they’d really want to do was talk about Mike. How could they not? I mean, whatever they’d been thinking, separately and together, his impending return had turned the world upside down. But, really, anything any of us might say would only be verbal nerves. We’d all be on eggshells until we actually laid eyes on him, till he was back and we could see how that realigned our stars.
I pulled on jeans and a T-shirt—a bright cab-yellow one that screamed: Alive!—and walked the half block to the café. When we arrived, Renzo was pouring espresso and a basket of his best pastries was on the table.
Leo hadn’t asked about the last twenty-four hours, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t eager to know. I took a long, wonderful swallow of coffee and said, “I wanted to stay till the cops opened up that chimney. But not nearly as much as they wanted me out of the way.”
He smiled and I had the feeling he was picturing Higgins’s reaction to that request.
“It’s probably just as well. I feel like the horror of it all will be with me forever. I understand why Guth—
Hammond
—could never pull free.”
“Delusion.”
“What?”
“You’re indulging in delusion. You don’t know what happened to Damon Guthrie in that fireplace. You can guess, even make a reasonable assumption, but you can never really know.”
That was what I’d thought when Tancarro had speculated. But it was such a personally unsatisfying answer. Yet, now, I knew that in itself was the point.
“Leo,” I said hesitantly, “can you tell me now what it was Guthrie—I mean, Ryan Hammond—was so desperate to discuss with you? What did he want to return to Gabriella? Just Damon’s wallet and driver’s license? Or was it”—I thought of Mom and Mike and all the years of his life she’d missed—“what he could tell her about what happened?”
“The
real
issue wasn’t what he had to return . . . but what he was desperate to be given.”
“Omigod, of course. He wanted an alternate explanation of what happened to Damon Guthrie.” Suddenly I could see it all so clearly. “If only Gabriella would tell him Damon had gone to Tahiti or to jail or had become a monk! Any explanation but the one he was already haunted by.”
Leo gave me some time to digest that ultimately depressing fact.
“Tancarro and Gabriella created fictional explanations. Kilmurray buried himself in drugs in Thailand trying for escape. Only Ryan Hammond wanted the truth.”
Leo sat silent a few moments longer. Finally, he said, “Listen, I have a question. I asked him if he’d ever had trouble using Damon Guthrie’s ID. Didn’t Missing Persons check Social Security records? He said no. But how—”
“Higgins asked Gabriella about that. It was like she was personally offended that there was no missing persons’ report. She really blindsided her. What happened, of course, is that in the beginning, Gabriella was so
relieved to have her brother gone, the last thing she wanted was the police to drag him back. Ditto Tancarro. And then by the time they had real questions about him, they didn’t dare make a report.”
He shifted position. “What about your, uh, colleague, Blink?”
“Higgins really didn’t want to discuss that. So, I’d say he’s ridden off into the sunset. The law might be looking for him, but he’ll be a low priority. He’s probably been evading the law since before I was born.”
“And the
Bullitt
car?”
“Drifted back into the realm of legend—its rightful place.”
I finished my espresso and sat here in my favorite café, holding the warm cup, looking out at the cars sparkling in the sunlight as they whipped down Columbus. “You know, Leo, last night after Gabriella tried to lock me in that horrible room with her brother’s remains, and I came up with her gun and called 911, I waited an eternity for the police to show up. When they finally came, I was so glad to see Higgins walk in I forgot what a pain in the ass she is.”
“Things change,” he said.