Lost Light (2003) Read online

  “I got you this clock for the wall. Now you’ll be able to tell the time when you need it.”

  He blew a burst of air out through his lips.

  “She’ll just take it down.”

  “I’ll tell her not to. Don’t worry.”

  I opened the toolbox and pulled out the hammer and a drywall nail from a plastic package that contained a variety of nails for different purposes. I surveyed the wall to the left of the television and picked a spot at center. There was an electrical outlet directly below. I held the nail up high on the wall and drove it halfway in with the hammer. I was hanging the clock when the door opened and Danny looked in.

  “What are you doing? He doesn’t want a clock in here.”

  I finished hanging the clock, lowered my hands and looked at her.

  “He told me he did want a clock.”

  We both looked at Law to settle it. His eyes flitted from his wife to me and then back again.

  “Let’s try having a clock for a while,” he said. “I’d like to know the time of day so I know when my shows are coming on.”

  “Fine,” she said in a clipped tone. “Whatever you want.”

  She left the room, closing the door behind her. I leaned over and plugged the clock’s line into the outlet. Then I checked my watch and reached up to set the time and turn on the camera. When I was finished I put the hammer back into the toolbox and snapped the latch.

  “Harry?”

  “What?” I asked, though I knew what the question would be.

  “Did you bring me some?”

  “A little.”

  I reopened the toolbox and took out the flask I had filled in the parking lot at the Vendome.

  “Danny said you’re hung over. You sure?”

  “’Course I’m sure. Give me a taste, Harry. I need it.”

  I went through the same routine as the day before and then waited to see if he could tell I had watered down the whiskey.

  “Ah, that’s the good stuff, Harry. Give me another, would you?”

  I did and then I closed the flask, feeling somehow guilty about giving this broken man the one joy he seemed to have left in life.

  “Listen, Law, I’m here to give you a heads-up. I think I sort of kicked over a can of worms with this thing.”

  “What happened?”

  “I tried to run down that agent you said had called Jack Dorsey about the currency numbers. You know, about the problem?”

  “Yeah, I know. Did you find her?”

  “No, Law, I didn’t. The agent was Martha Gessler. That ring a bell with you?”

  His eyes moved across the ceiling as if that was where he kept his memory banks.

  “No, should it?”

  “I don’t know. She’s missing. She’s been missing for three years, since right about the time she called Jack.”

  “Holy shit, Harry.”

  “Yeah. So I kind of walked into that when I called up to try to track that call.”

  “They’re going to come talk to me?”

  “I don’t know. But that’s the heads-up. I think they might. Somehow, they’ve got this whole thing tied into a terrorism angle. It’s one of these post-September eleven crews running with it now. And I hear they like to kick ass and read the rule book later.”

  “I don’t want them coming here, Harry. What did you start?”

  “I’m sorry about that, Law. If they come, just let them ask their questions and you answer them the best you can. Get their names and tell Danny to call me after they leave.”

  “I’ll try. I just want to be left alone.”

  “I know, Law.”

  I moved closer to his chair and held the flask up into his field of vision.

  “You want more?”

  “Does the pope shit in the woods?”

  I poured a good slug into his mouth, then a chaser. I waited for it to go down and then work its way back up into his eyes. They seemed to glaze over.

  “You okay?”

  “Fine.”

  “There are a few more questions I have for you. They sort of came to me after I talked to the bureau.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like about the phone call Jack got. The FBI says there was no record of Gessler calling about the currency list.”

  “That’s simple. Maybe it wasn’t her. Like I said, I didn’t get a name from Jack. Or if I did it’s gone. I don’t remember it.”

  “I’m pretty sure it was her. Everything else you described about it fits. She had a program like you described on her laptop. It went missing with her.”

  “There you go. There probably was a record of her calling. It just disappeared with her.”

  “I guess so. What about the time of the call? Can you remember anything more about that, about when it came in?”

  “Ah, jeez, I don’t know, Harry. It was just one of those things. It was just a call. I’m sure Jack put it on the log.”

  He was talking about the chronological log. Everything was always entered on the log. Or was supposed to be.

  “Yeah, I know,” I said. “But I don’t have access to that. I’m on the outside, remember?”

  “Yeah.”

  “You told me you thought it was ten or so months into the case, remember? You said you were working other cases by then and Jack took over lead on Angella Benton. Her murder was May sixteenth of ’ninety-nine. Martha Gessler disappeared the following March nineteenth. That’s almost exactly ten months later.”

  “So I remembered it right. What else you want from me?”

  “It’s just that . . .”

  I didn’t finish. I was trying to figure out what to ask and how to say it. Something wasn’t right about the chronology.

  “It’s just what?”

  “I don’t know. It seems to me if Jack had recently talked to this agent he would have said something about it when she went missing. It was a big story, you know? In the papers and on the TV every night. Is there any way the call could have come earlier? Closer to the beginning of the case? That way Jack might have forgotten about it and her by the time she hit the news.”

  Cross didn’t say anything for a while as he considered this. I considered other possibilities, too, but kept hitting logic walls.

  “Give me another shot of that stuff, would you, Harry?”

  He tried to suck too much of it down and it backed up and burned his throat. When he spoke again his voice was hoarser than usual.

  “I don’t think so. I think it was ten months.”

  “Close your eyes for a second, Law.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Just close your eyes and concentrate on that memory. Whatever it is that you have, that you’re keying on, concentrate on that.”

  “You trying to hypnotize me, Harry?”

  “I’m just trying to focus your thoughts, help you remember what Jack said.”

  “It won’t work.”

  “Not if you don’t let it. Relax, Law. Relax and try to forget everything. Like your mind’s a blackboard and you’re erasing it. Think about what Jack said about the call.”

  His eyes moved under the thin, pale eyelids but after a few moments they slowed and stopped. I watched his face and waited. It was years since I had tried any hypnotic techniques, and that had been to draw out visual descriptions of events and suspects. What I wanted from Cross now was a memory of a time and place and the dialogue that went with it.

  “You see the blackboard, Law?”

  “Yeah, I see it.”

  “Okay, go to the board and write Jack’s name on it. Write it at the top so you have room underneath it.”

  “Harry, this is stupid. I —”

  “Just humor me, Law. Write Jack’s name at the top of the board.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, Law, that’s good. Now look at the board and underneath Jack’s name write the words ‘phone call.’ Okay?”

  “Okay, did it.”

  “Good. Now look at those three wor
ds and concentrate on them. Jack. Phone call. Jack. Phone call.”

  The silence that followed my words was punctuated by the barely discernible ticking of the new clock.

  “Now, Law, I want you to concentrate on the black around those words. Around those letters. Go through the letters, Law, into the black. Go through the letters.”

  I waited and watched his eyelids. I saw the retinal movement begin again.

  “Jack is talking to you, Law. He’s telling you about the agent. He says she has new information on the movie set heist.”

  I waited for a long moment, wondering if I should have mentioned Gessler by name, then deciding it was better that I hadn’t.

  “What is he saying to you, Law?”

  “There’s something wrong with the numbers. They don’t match.”

  “Did she call him?”

  “She called him.”

  “Where are you when he is telling you this, Law?”

  “We’re in the car. We’ve got court.”

  “Is it a trial?”

  “Yes.”

  “Whose trial is it?”

  “It’s that little Mexican kid. The little gangbanger who killed the Korean jeweler on Western. Alejandro Penjeda. It’s the verdict.”

  “Penjeda is the defendant?”

  “That’s right.”

  “And Jack got the call from the agent before you went to court to hear the verdict?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Okay, Law.”

  I had gotten what I wanted. I tried to think what else I could ask him.

  “Law? Did Jack say what the agent’s name was?”

  “No, he didn’t say.”

  “Did he say he would check out the information she gave him?”

  “He said he’d do some checking but that he thought it was a bullshit call. He said he didn’t think it meant anything.”

  “Did you believe him?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, Law, I’m going to tell you to open your eyes in a moment. And when you open them, I want you to feel like you just woke up but I want you to remember what we just talked about. Okay?”

  “Okay, yes.”

  “And the other thing is I want you to feel better. I want you to be . . . okay about things in your life. I want you to be as happy as you can be, Law. Okay?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, Law, open your eyes now.”

  The eyelids fluttered once and then they were open. They strafed the ceiling and then came to me. They seemed brighter than before.

  “Harry . . .”

  “How do you feel, Law?”

  “Okay.”

  “You remember what we were talking about?”

  “Yeah, that little Mex. Penjeda. We called him PinHeada. He didn’t take the deal the DA floated. Life with. He took his chances with the jury and got snake eyes. Life without.”

  “Live and learn.”

  What sounded like what might have been a laugh gurgled from deep in his throat.

  “Yeah, that was a good one,” he said. “I remember when we were going over to court that day was when Jack told me about the call from Westwood.”

  “Right. You remember when that verdict came in on Penjeda?”

  “End of February, beginning of March. My last trial, Harry. A month later I took the bullet in that shithole bar and I was history. I remember watching PinHeada’s face when he heard that verdict and knew he was facing life without parole. Fucker got what he deserved.”

  The laugh came up again and then I saw the light go out of his eyes.

  “What is it, Law?”

  “He’s up there at Corcoran playing handball in the yard or getting his ass rented out by the Mexican Mafia on an hourly basis. And I’m here. I got life without, too, I guess.”

  His eyes looked into mine. I nodded because it was the only thing I could think of to do.

  “It’s not fair, Harry. Life isn’t fair.”

  17

  The downtown library was on Flower and Figueroa. It was one of the oldest buildings in the whole city. Therefore it was dwarfed by the modern glass-and-steel structures that surrounded it. Inside it was a beauty, centered around a domed rotunda with 360-degree mosaics depicting the founding of the city by the padres. The place had been twice burned by arsonists and closed for years, then restored to its original beauty. I had come after the restoration was completed, the first time back since I was a child. And I continued to come. It brought me close to the Los Angeles I remembered. Where I felt comfortable. I would take my lunch in the book rooms or the upper-level patios while reading case files and writing notes. I got to know the security guards and a few of the librarians. I had a library card, though I rarely checked out a book.

  I went to the library after leaving Lawton Cross because I no longer could call on Keisha Russell to help me with clip searches. Her call to Sacramento to run a check on me when I had asked her to simply run a clip search on Martha Gessler was the warning. Her journalistic curiosity would lead her further than my requests, to places I didn’t want her to go.

  The main reference desk was on the second floor. I recognized the woman behind the counter, though I had never spoken to her before. I could tell she recognized me as I approached. I used a library card where a police shield used to do. She read it and recognized the name.

  “Do you know that you have the same name as a famous painter?” she asked.

  “Yes, I know.”

  Her face flushed. She was midthirties with an unattractive hairstyle. She wore a name tag that said Mrs. Molloy.

  “Of course you do,” she said. “You must know that. How can I help you?”

  “I need to look for stories that were in the Times from about three years ago.”

  “You want to do a key word search?”

  “I guess so. What is that?”

  She smiled.

  “We have the Los Angeles Times on computer going back to nineteen eighty-seven. If what you are looking for was published after that, all you have to do is go online on one of our computers, type in a key word or phrase, like a name, for example, that you think is in the story and it will search for it. There is a five-dollar-per-hour fee for accessing the newspaper archives.”

  “Fine, that’s what I want to do.”

  She smiled and reached beneath the counter. She handed me a white plastic device that was about a foot long. It looked like no computer I had ever seen.

  “How do I use this?”

  She almost laughed.

  “It’s a pager. All our computers are being used at the moment. I will page you as soon as one becomes available.”

  “Oh.”

  “The pager doesn’t work outside of the building. It also does not emit an audible page. It vibrates. So keep it on your person.”

  “I will. Any idea how long it will be?”

  “We set one-hour use limits, which right now would mean one won’t be available for another thirty minutes. However, people often don’t require the full hour.”

  “Okay, thank you. I’ll be nearby.”

  I found an empty table in one of the reading rooms and decided to work on the case chronology. I got out my notebook and on a fresh page wrote down the three key dates and events I knew.

  Angella Benton—murdered—May 16, 1999

  Movie set heist—May 19, 1999

  Martha Gessler—missing—March 19, 2000

  I then began adding the things I was missing.

  Gessler/Dorsey—phone call—?????

  And after a few moments I thought of something else that might help explain something that bothered me.

  Dorsey/Cross—murder/shooting—?????

  I looked around to see if anyone was using a cell phone. I wanted to make a call but wasn’t sure it would be allowed in a library. When I turned and looked behind me I saw a man standing by a magazine rack quickly turn away and take a magazine off the display without seeming to look at what it was first. He was dressed in blue jeans a
nd a flannel shirt. Nothing about him said FBI but it still seemed to me that he had been looking directly at me until I had looked at him. His reaction had been too quick, almost furtive. There had been no eye contact, nothing that suggested any sort of overture. The man clearly didn’t want me to know he was watching me.