April Smith: Good Morning, Killer

“A grudge.” Andrew was watching her closely. “A threat.”

The mom’s cheeks flared even brighter.

“I’ll tell you who it is!” Ross snapped his fingers. “I should have thought of it before! David Yi.”

David Yi was a trusted employee who turned out to be a member of a Korean gang that worked the downtown garment district. He figured out the alarm system, broke into the plant and stole three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of spandex. Ross had testified against him.

“Good. We’ll check out David Yi. Next.”

It is a statistical certainty that the longer a person is missing, the smaller the chances of recovery.

“Stephanie Kent. The girl Juliana was supposed to meet. Do you have an address?”

Lynn said she did, and I followed her up the bare oak stairs to get it, she in her blue running pants moving heavily, I in the black suit, impatient. I wanted to see the daughter’s room. To touch her bedclothes and breathe her teenage hibiscus perfume.

It was my job to know the victim as if she were my own flesh and blood.

In that way, I would know her abductor.

“I see Juliana swims.” Spotting a suit and towel hanging over the banister. Remembering the thongs.

“She was on the swim team,” replied the mother, “but she quit. Another thing she quit.” Her voice was faint. “I guess we should have told you.”

“It’s okay. We’re only at the beginning of this.”

I shouldn’t have said that.

She pushed on the door, and Juliana’s world opened up to me.

The Kent residence was on a walk-through street in a “transitional” part of Venice, which meant you could pay six hundred thousand dollars for a tear-down and still get hit by a random gang bullet.

Andrew and I stayed in contact on the cells all the way over. Cell phones and pagers were our thing. Because of our schedules sometimes we couldn’t see each other for a couple of weeks, but we’d talk, weaving in and out of a never-ending conversation about police work, police gossip, police movies, police screwups and the Dodgers. Tension would build. Then would come the teasing call, the secret beeper code: it is surprising how sexy you can feel driving a tan Crown Victoria.

“Think the parents are in it?”

“I’m not ready to rule them out.”

“Me either. What about the dad? Think he’s molesting the girl? That’s why she split?”

“I don’t know, but the guy was pretty stuck on that spandex theft. We should check it out for insurance fraud.”

“Would you wait on the polygraph?”

“Kind of early,” Andrew agreed.

“But what about the two of them? Lynn and Ross?”

“It’s an old marriage. You can smell it. Rotting meat.”

“Oh, Andrew!”

“What?”

I mugged so Andrew would see me in his rearview mirror and was rewarded when the top third of his face broke into a smile.

“You are so cynical about relationships.”

“I’ve been there,” Andrew said into the phone wedged between shoulder and ear. “In fact, I’ve been there so often my name is permanently inscribed in the relationship crapper.”

“Is that supposed to be inspiring?”

“I never make promises.”

“Really?”

We had pulled up and parked. Our car doors slammed and we drew in our jackets against the uncertain weather. The sky was full of moving clouds like squirting inks, charcoal and mauve. It was 4 p.m. A brief white light struck the puddles platinum.

“I thought you promised to move in with me,” I said. “Sooner or later.”

“Wasn’t it the other way around?”

“I don’t want to lose my lease.”

We crossed the street. When he spoke again, his voice had dropped to that somber do-not-argue pitch. “It’s my father’s house. I can’t sell it.”

“Isn’t that love ?” I poked his ribs.

“Isn’t what?”

“Giving it up?”

When I looked over he was watching me deeply, enigmatically.

“I’m just looking for safe passage, hon.”

“Meaning?”

“An expression my dad used to say when he had to tell us something. ‘Give me safe passage.’ And you’d say, ‘Okay.’ And he’d say, ‘I know you’re smoking cigarettes and it ain’t gonna cut it.’ ” “Like, don’t get mad at me.”

“Like, help me through this.”

“So, Andy — is there something you need help getting through?”

He laughed sardonically. “The fucking day.”

The walk-through streets, a maze of lanes too tiny for cars, had become prized for their bohemian hipness. Five years ago this area was a slum, but entertainment and foreign money was moving in, building eclectic houses like the Kents’—small, but well-proportioned and impeccably postmodern, with a Xeriscape garden made of cacti and rocks.

“What’s the point of a garden,” Andrew asked as we walked up the gravel path, “without flowers?”

“Saves water.”

“These people can’t pay for water?”

Andrew was an azalea man. The shade garden behind the one-story cottage in Sunset Park was the legacy of his father, who had also been a Santa Monica police officer. Sergeant E. Prescott Berringer, originally from North Beach, San Francisco, made his own beef jerky and brewed his own beer, and so did Andrew, who maintained the backyard meticulously, a shrine. You could eat off the potting table, and you never saw so many different-sized clippers and shears oiled and sharpened and hung in their places. Sunday mornings, when we first started going out, I would try to be cheery and helpful with the weeding and whatever, but it didn’t come naturally, like tending someone else’s child. Andrew took my tools away. “That’s okay,” he’d say, “I’ll do it,” and ignore me for a couple of hours.

One day Andrew told me he had been adopted, and I applied that like a balm to his remoteness and silences, all my discouragements and puzzlements and questions. It made the bond to his father sizzlingly poignant. There was a photo in the bedroom of Andrew (eight years old) and E. Prescott, both wearing Dodger jerseys. He said they often dressed alike. Mom was meek, and Dad, I guessed from the curly blond hair and cocksure posture, played around. The father-and-son photo hung next to a plaque Andrew received when he made detective. It read, “The Homicide Investigator’s Oath,” and listed Ten Commandments, including “ Thou Shalt Not Kill. ” At the time, I took all this to mean that Andrew was a person of discipline.

A frosted glass door was opened by the mother of Stephanie Kent, the girl who Juliana was supposed to have met at the bus stop yesterday. Mrs. Kent, hearing our business, wrapped her arms around her waist, as if we had brought an icy wind.

“You mean Juliana isn’t back?”

“We’re optimistic that she will be.”

“My God, what could have happened to her? Anything could have happened! I have to tell you, this is not like Juliana.”

“No?”

“How is Lynn doing? I haven’t talked to her since last night.”

Andrew gave the compassionate cop shrug. “Hard times.”

“The longer Juliana’s missing, the worse it is, isn’t it?” said Mrs. Kent knowingly. “My husband is a TV director. He’s done episodes of Law and Order and NYPD Blue. ” Andrew’s mouth twitched which was like an electric shock to the pelvic giggle nerve. I had to look away not to pee my pants.

“We understand Juliana and Stephanie were friends?”

“She was new, we were just getting to know her. But she seemed like an awfully nice girl. That’s one of the things I am so proud of with Stephanie. The way she reaches out to other kids.”

“Can we talk to Stephanie?” I asked.