Brian Freeman - The Crooked Street

“What a terrible thing,” Tabby murmured. After a pause, she went on. “Duane told me a little about Carla. He called her a girl from your past.”

“That’s right.”

“I didn’t think you had a past, Frost. I thought you ran away from relationships.”

“This one is complicated.”

“He said Carla married your friend Denny.”

“Yes, she did.”

“Were you in love with her? Did she break your heart?”

Frost shook his head. “No, that wasn’t the problem. I didn’t love her, but she loved me.”

Tabby didn’t ask for more details. Not yet. A mile passed, and he merged onto the gray span of the bridge, where the dark vastness of the bay stretched out beneath them. Tabby stared out the window, which was open an inch, filling the interior with a loud, hissing wind. Shack crawled off her lap and curled into a tiny ball on the seat between them. The cat sighed as he drifted off to sleep.

“So tell me more about you and Carla,” Tabby said finally.

Frost tried to decide how much to say. As he drove, the truck began to feel warm. He saw the red taillights ahead of him blur through wisps of fog. The tall bridge span, lit with white lights, loomed over their heads. He hadn’t thought about Carla in a long time, but the memories felt fresh and bitter.

“She started working for me and Denny halfway through our year on the boat,” he told Tabby. “Carla was the girl on the wharf, hawking customers. Most of the time she wore her bikini while she was doing it. Needless to say, she drummed up a lot of business that way. She began living on the boat with us. The three of us spent so much time together, we were practically inseparable. We were all really close.”

“Close isn’t always so good when three people are involved,” Tabby said.

Frost kept his eyes on the road. “No. It’s not. The thing is, Carla was very pretty, but she was unstable, too. You could just look at her and know there were demons rattling around in her head. Anyway, Denny began falling in love with Carla, which was fine, but for some reason Carla decided that she was in love with me.”

“For some reason?” Tabby said.

“I never encouraged her.”

“Well, give yourself a little credit, Frost. I can think of a lot of reasons.”

He didn’t know what to say to that.

“I tried to let her down gently, but she got angry and desperate about the two of us. And all the while, Denny was pissed off that Carla was interested in me, not him. Everything began to fall apart. That’s when I decided to get out of the business and leave Denny on his own. Unfortunately, I was too late.”

“What happened?”

Frost could see it all replaying in his head as he told her. He looked down at the black water. It had happened down there, not far away, where the currents swirled around Treasure Island. They’d taken a moonlight cruise, just the three of them. Denny had gotten drunk. So had Carla, and she’d made another wild pass at Frost right in front of Denny. Frost had rejected her again. First, she’d become enraged, screaming and throwing things at him, and then she’d gone below to cry. When too much time passed, he’d gone to check on her. He found her in the cabin, where she’d hung herself from the shower pipe. She was unconscious, but he’d managed to revive her.

“Oh, Frost,” Tabby whispered.

“I felt guilty about that for a long time,” he said.

“You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“Maybe not, but I felt like I did.”

“What about Denny?” Tabby asked. “What happened between the two of you?”

“We took Carla to the hospital,” Frost continued, “and then we went back to the boat. Denny was still drunk and crazy. He jumped me from behind and started whaling on me. I fought him off, but I really think he would have killed me if he’d had the chance. That was the last time I set foot on the boat. I was done. I heard that Denny and Carla got married a couple of years later, and then they split up a couple of years after that. I never saw either of them again. Not until yesterday.”

Tabby blinked. “Wow.”

“Yeah. Wow.”

“Who else knows the whole story?”

“Duane. Herb. Katie knew about it when she was alive. That’s all.”

Tabby didn’t say anything more. He reached the eastern shore of the bay and merged north onto the I-580 freeway, heading for the Berkeley exits. The lights of heavy traffic surrounded them, and he had to slow down. He got off the freeway at University Avenue and headed east from the water. Even on one of its main streets, Berkeley still had the feel of a small town hidden inside a city. Like San Francisco, it was young, liberal, and quirky, but Berkeley hadn’t sold its soul to the tech gods the way San Francisco had. Life still revolved around the university campus and its earnest academics.

He turned into a leafy residential area and made his way to a cul-de-sac beside the green ribbon of Strawberry Creek Park. He parked and confirmed Carla’s address. At the end of the street, he could make out a wooden bridge leading over the creek toward a stand of evergreens. He recognized the bridge from Coyle’s photo and knew there was a snake painted on the ground in front of it.

They were in the right place.

“Do you need me to stay here?” Tabby asked.

“No, you can come with me if you’d like.”

They both got out of the Suburban. Shack didn’t bother waking up. Frost led them into the parking lot of a five-story apartment building that was in need of a paint job. Carla’s place was on the top floor. The exterior door to the building was open, and the interior had an acrid ammonia smell. He saw no security cameras. They took the elevator, which was noisy and slow, and Frost found Carla’s apartment halfway down the hallway.

A young man with bleached-white hair answered the door. He wore a flowered shirt and jean shorts, with bare feet. He had earrings through both nostrils and both ears. Behind him, Frost saw moving boxes on the apartment’s beige carpet.

Frost showed him his badge. “I’m Homicide Inspector Frost Easton. This is Ms. Blaine. Did Carla Steiff live here?”

The man didn’t question Frost’s credentials from the other side of the bay. “Yeah, Carla was my roommate.”

“Do you mind if I ask you a couple of questions?”

He shrugged. “Go for it. All I’m doing is packing up my crap. When somebody offs themselves in your bathtub, you don’t feel like sticking around, you know? My name’s Tony, by the way. Tony Frattalone.”

Frost sat down on a sagging tweed sofa, and Tabby sat next to him. They could see the bathroom on the other side of the apartment, and Tabby kept watching it, as if a ghost might appear in the doorway. The room had the chemical smell of medical and police teams that had swarmed the place the previous day.

“Did you know Ms. Steiff well?” Frost asked.

“Not really,” Tony replied, “and that was fine with me.”

“Oh? Why do you say that?”

“The girl was weird, and that’s saying a lot around Berkeley, you know? Believe me, if it wasn’t for the cheap rent, I would have been out of here a long time ago.”

“Did her suicide surprise you?” Frost asked.

“It was gruesome to find, but surprising? No. She had issues.”

“Can you tell me what happened?”

“All I know is, I went to work on Friday. I got back early evening, and she was dead.”

“Had anything been going on in her life that would have made her unhappy?” Frost asked.

“There was nothing specific that I knew about. She wasn’t a happy person, that’s for sure. Gorgeous and hot, but not happy.”

“Do you know a man named Denny Clark?”

Tony nodded. “Carla’s ex. He was around here a lot. If you ask me, I can’t understand why someone who got dumped by that girl would keep coming back for more. Consider yourself lucky to get away, you know? But Clark kept hiring her for jobs on his boat. I think he was still hooked on her.”