“We were hoping you might give us a fresh perspective,” she said. “Some original ideas.”
“The butler did it.”
“Joel said—”
Jimmy took his shot, sank the ball. “I used to have original ideas,” he said. “Then time and the world conspired to beat them out of me. Now I think the same thing as everybody else, only a little later.”
He was still trying to impress her. He sank the three. It made a nice click.
“Kantke,” Jimmy said. “Is that German?”
“Yes.”
“Nice to meet you.” He gave her a smile and offered her the cue.
She didn’t take it.
“I asked Joel to invite you,” she said.
In a beat, he changed, went cold, pulled inside. A familiar sadness overtook him, the way a cloud slides over the moon.
He went back to his game.
“I knew you and Joel were friends,” she said, as he closed down. “I’d like for you to look into something for me. Joel said—”
Jimmy sank a shot and cut her off. “I helped Joel with something a while back and he’s had the wrong idea about me ever since,” he said. “I gotta talk to him about that.”
“Please,” she said. “I know all about you.”
Now he gave her a challenging look.
“You only take cases every once in a while,” she said.
He waited. He wasn’t going to make it any easier for her.
“Nobody seems to know why you take the cases you take,” she said, putting one word after another. “Money doesn’t seem to be a factor—but I have money.”
He already knew that. And he knew that she was used to people listening to her, doing what she said.
He put the cue in the rack.
“Are you in business?” he said.
“I own a company.”
“I’m sure you know some investigators, security companies. There are some good ones.”
“This isn’t about my business,” she said. “It’s about something that happened a long time ago.”
Each one of the words of that second sentence came hard for her. But he still just looked at her and smiled and left her standing there.
A Mexican maid was watching a little TV on the counter in the kitchen. On screen was a school picture of a Latino boy ten or eleven, an image that has come to mean “missing child” or “dead boy.” The story was being told in Spanish. The picture of the boy gave way to a family crying in front of a little house, then an angle on a relative arriving, caught in the first moment he stepped from the car and got the news. On the L.A. Spanish stations the crime coverage was always more explicit, more theatrical, more frightening: Monsters walk among us! was the theme.
Jimmy came in. The maid tensed, but smiled. He opened a couple of cabinets until he found a glass. She watched as he filled it at the sink and drank it down.
She had a Band-Aid on her finger. He asked her about it. “Te cortaste el dedo? Penso que era un hot dog?”
She laughed and shook her head.
Then Jean came in.
She stopped under a bright recessed ceiling light, stood under its glare like a defendant in a sci-fi scene.
“In 1977,” she said, “my father, Jack Kantke, was convicted of killing my mother and a friend of hers. In Long Beach. I was five.”
There.
Jean looked at the maid. The maid looked at the TV.
Jimmy drew another glass of water and looked out at the backyard. A fog was filling the back of the canyon, rolling down from on high like a very slow waterfall. It was always sad when you heard what it was.
“My father was Assistant D.A.,” Jean continued. “Mother was a dress designer. It was in all the papers, even Time magazine. There were appeals. He was executed in 1992. The gas chamber.”
It was so matter-of-fact. So repeated.
“I know people say you shouldn’t go back into the past,” she said.
“I never say that,” Jimmy turned and said.
“I just—”
“Were you there? When it happened?”
“No. I was at my grandmother’s.”
She’d lost some of her force from before. He liked her this way. This was the big hurt in her life. Most people, you’d have to know them for months or years to find out what it was. Maybe it was why he did this, looked into things. He liked knowing, even when in the end sometimes it tore him up.
“So what do you want to know?”
“If he really killed her,” Jean said. “Killed them. He swore he didn’t.”