I said, "Why didn't you call me when Vikki was killed?"
Earl said, "We didn't know where you were living."
"Did you try to find out? You could have hired someone to find me. There are always people you can hire, aren't there?"
Earl found his sack. He stood up. "Now see here. You can't just—"
"Yes, we can. Now sit down." It wasn't me. It was Jenny. The look on her face . . . Earl saw it and and dumped his rich butt back on the sofa.
"Where do you draw the line?" Jenny said.
"Dear—" It was Susan.
"Don't 'dear' me, Granny. Just tell me where you draw the line."
"What line is that, dear?"
"The line," I said, "marking what you'd do to keep the wrong person out of your family."
Now Earl smiled. Thought he had something on me. "A quarter million. Back then, with you, a hundred thousand was it. You'd held out for any more, that would have been that. You would have married her and we would have had to put up for each other for all this time. But you didn't hold out. You took the money." He turned to Jenny. "Has he told you about that?"
"He has." One of the things we covered on the ride up. She hadn't blinked.
"These days," Earl said, "a quarter million seems reasonable. That's what I offered that Ahmed character. I have to hand it to the raghead. He didn't think about it for a second."
"So," I said, "you decided to get him killed. Only things went wrong and she died instead. How'd the two of you feel about it? Minor inconvenience?"
"Please," Susan said. "We were very deeply affected when Susan was killed. We loved her very much."
My guess was, she thought she was telling the truth. "Who's Jay?" I said.
"Who?" Both of them.
"The man who recruited the guys who were supposed to take out Ahmed, but got Vikki instead."
"I have no idea what you're talking about," Earl said.
I turned to Susan. "What about you?"
"We didn't recruit anyone," she said. "We don't know anyone named Jay."
I studied them for a couple of seconds. Back and forth, back and forth. Then I said, "Let's go." I went to the door, opened it, walked out to the sidewalk. Jenny was right behind me.
As soon as we were moving, I said, "They didn't do it."
"You're sure?"
"You spend enough time around liars, you figure out who is one and who isn't. These two are no doubt full of crap most of the time, but they were telling the truth in there. They didn't send anyone after Ahmed. They didn't get your mother killed."
"Then who did?"
You don't want to lie to your kids. Which is why, somewhere under the layers of insulation shrouding my heart, I felt a twinge when I said, "I have no idea."
#
We went back to the hotel. Sat in the bar nursing a couple of beers. I caught the bartender staring at Jenny a few times. Caught her looking back once or twice.
"What now?" she asked me.
"We go home."
"We're not going to keep looking?"
"My best guess is, it really was what it seemed. Home invasion gone bad."
"I'm not convinced. I still want to—"
"Not now. Maybe another day. You'll know when it's time."
When I called it a night, she said she was going to stick around for one more. I got up and went to bed. A little later I heard a couple of voices outside Jenny's door. Then it opened and closed. Sometimes you need a stranger.
#
We drove back home a lot faster than we'd left. Jenny hung around my place for a while, but she was antsy and so was I. She said she had to fly back to Israel. We didn't make plans to see each other again. We both knew we would, whenever one of us needed to. It was a new thing in my life. Made me all warm and fuzzy inside. Okay, a little warm, slightly fuzzy.
Next day I drove back up to Applegate. I got there just as the sun was disappearing behind the hills. It was hot and the air was the kind that makes your lungs ache.
I stood on the droopy porch, listening to the TV blaring inside. Larry the Lemur is in trouble! Let's go save him!
Most of the time, it's an enormous help to be able to judge when someone's full of crap.
Every so often, I'm not so sure.
I knocked on the door. Then more loudly. Tina Naylor opened it. She saw me and she knew. She said, "You kids be good in there," stepped out, closed the door behind her. We stood staring at each other until she dropped down into an ancient wooden chair. I leaned against a railing. It protested but held. "There's no Jay," I said.
She shook her head. "Picked the name out of the air. Fact is, I don't know how they settled on that place."
"But you were the one who got it started."
She looked up at me, and in the last of the daylight her eyes were a million years old. "You saw my daughter Sally?"
"I saw two daughters."
"Not the heavy one."
I nodded. "Down?"
"Uh-huh. It costs a lot, taking care of a kid like that. I mean, I love her to death, but sometimes she's a handful, and I wanted to get her in a special school. Those places cost money. I nagged Chip so much he . . . he was the brains of the three of them. Can you believe that? No wonder they got caught."
"And them all getting killed in prison?"
A shrug. "Ferdie and Duke were jerks. Kind of guys you run into in jail, I'm not surprised they pissed somebody off enough to kill 'em. Far as Chip goes . . . like I said, he was gorgeous. I went to visit him, he said someone was trying to make him his bitch and next time he tried it Chip was going to give him what for. I guess he gave Chip what for." She stood, moved to the edge of the porch like she might take off, depending on my answer to her next question. "So what happens now?"
"Nothing."
She looked at me. Nodded slowly. Then walked past me and went back inside. The scent of detergent slowly dissolved into the twilight.
I walked to the car. Sat awhile, waiting for the first stars to show up. Tina Naylor hadn't done anything to me. And she wasn't an evil person. And those kids—Emmy and poor little Sally—needed a mother.
Someday, though, Jenny would know it was time to start looking again. She'd need to find out what really happened. I had no doubt she had the capabilities to do so. She'd be sitting in a car in this same driveway. It would be her call what to do next.
#
The day after, I drove back to Scottsdale and took care of Earl and Susan. They'd been enjoying a world that was much too good for them for much too long.
I made it look like a gas leak. I thought it was a nice touch, given how Earl made his millions. Someday, when I told Jenny about it, I thought she'd appreciate it too. Though probably, I was guessing, not as much as the Mission in downtown L.A. would appreciate Earl and Susan's anonymous donation of fifty thousand dollars.
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