Джонатан Келлерман - Crime Scene

Seeing where this was going, I said, “I had work. I wouldn’t’ve been able to come.”

She shook her head, dry blond and gray, a shivering haystack. “I’m not going to ask when was the last time you went.”

“Okay.”

“Do you know when was it?”

“You just said you’re not going to ask.”

“More than two years,” she said.

“There you go,” I said. “You answered your own question.”

“I thought maybe you didn’t realize how long it’s been.”

Keeping my voice even required a supreme effort. “How’s he doing?”

“The same.”

“Did he ask you for commissary money?”

“They feed them like slaves, Clay. He lives on ramen. It’s the only way for him not to starve to death.”

“Ramen is currency, there. You know that, right? He trades it for drugs.”

“Stop.”

“Did he look well nourished to you?”

She spread tight, pale hands. “I don’t want to hear it, please.”

In the kitchen, the dishwasher gurgled to life.

“He has a girlfriend,” my mother said.

It took me a second to process. “Luke?”

“She started writing to him. Her name is Andrea. He showed me her picture. She lives in Salinas.”

“Pen pal, huh.”

“She’s been to see him,” my mother said. “Twice.”

I resented the implicit comparison. “And we’re sure this isn’t some sort of scam?”

“I don’t see what she could possibly expect to get out of him,” she said.

“I’m trying to figure out why a woman would write to him out of nowhere.”

“People are lonely,” she said. “ He’s lonely. It makes him happy.”

“Good for him.”

She tilted her head. “Why are you so angry at him?”

I said, “Why aren’t you ?”

She clasped her hands, as if in prayer. “He’s going to get out, you know.”

“I’m aware.”

“And? What’s going to happen then? Because soon — let me finish, please. Sooner than you realize, he’ll get out, and you won’t have been to visit him. You’ll both know it. That’s going to be hanging between the two of you.”

I brushed at crumbs on the tablecloth.

“He’s still your brother,” she said. “That’s never going away.”

That was the problem.

Family. It’s an incurable disease.

Lydia Delavigne — Rennert’s ex-wife; Tatiana’s mother — lived on the thirty-first floor of a newly built high-rise in San Francisco, a torqued platinum phallus blocks from the Embarcadero.

I left my car with the valet, made myself known to the concierge. While he called up to her “suite” I answered another email from Amy, confirming our plans for that evening.

The concierge said, “You can go up.”

I headed for the elevator bank.

A high-speed car shot into the sky, spat me out into a silent corridor carpeted in near-black blue and painted barely-above-white gray.

A woman was waiting in the doorway to 3109. She was thin, her spine arrow-straight, making the most of her small stature. Black hair tied in a tight bun; ivory skin, with smoky nuances, same as Tatiana. She wore black leggings, navy shoes with kitten heels, a billowing gray silk tunic patterned with deep-blue butterflies.

Color-coordinated with the hallway.

“Behold,” she said, “the man fucking my daughter.”

What can you say to that other than nothing?

She didn’t seem bothered. It was more like she was assigning me a classification.

She went inside, leaving me to follow.

She kicked off her shoes in the entry hall and padded ahead.

“Make yourself comfortable,” she said.

Her apartment evoked The Future, circa 1975: a single room, open, vaulted, and finished in white from top to bottom — surfaces, fixtures, and furnishings. It made for disorienting effect, washing away depth and compressing space. Steps led down to a sunken sitting area with two white sofas, a lustrous white coffee table, piles of white pillows on a stitched cowhide rug.

In its immensity, its blankness, the place felt like a photographic and philosophical negative to Walter Rennert’s attic. Their marriage must’ve been interesting.

“Tea?” she said, moving toward the kitchen area, a speed kettle already piping.

“Yes, please.” I faced the eastern wall, a solid sheet of glass overlooking the Financial District, skyscrapers reduced to ash by a scouring midwinter sun. “Nice view.”

“On a clear day you can see forever.”

“How many clear days do you get a year?”

“Not a one,” she said gaily. “But who wants to see forever? That sounds hideous.”

She brought a tray down to the sitting area and placed it on the table, curling up against the sofa arm, her legs folded beneath her. She had tiny hands; tiny, delicate fingers. They barely reached around her mug. The veins in her neck and wrists were Delft blue. The resemblance to Tatiana was so striking that her comment about sex began to bother me.

She sidled closer, allowing the tunic to ride up. My chest got tight.

She said, “Beauty is editing.”

I took a gulp, scalding the roof of my mouth. “Tatiana said the same thing.”

Lydia halted her advance. “Did she.”

“She said she’s a minimalist at heart.”

“I’m sure she would never admit that to me.”

“She doesn’t seem to have a problem admitting things to you.”

“Who else should she tell, if not her mother?”

“Is she required to tell anyone?”

“Oh but yes,” she said. “Otherwise it might never have happened. We talk, we share our experiences, so that we exist.”

She lolled back, inspecting me. “You know, she said you were a big boy, but hearing and seeing are not the same. Don’t worry, she didn’t go into excessive detail. Look, you’re blushing, how perfectly charming.”

“How’s it going for her in Portland?”

“If you’re fishing to find out whether she returned, she did. A few days ago.”

I set the mug aside. “Does she know I’m here?”

“Not yet. Should we make it our little secret?”

“No need,” I said. “If you speak to her, send my best.”

“If I speak to her before you do, I will,” Lydia said. She mirrored me, putting down her own mug. “I birthed a free spirit, I honored that as I raised her, allowing her to be who she wanted to be. Watching her evolve was lovely. She’s always been so much like me. Though by her age, I’d accomplished what I’d set out to accomplish.”

Her arms had begun to twine toward the ceiling. I couldn’t tell if it was deliberate or simply a reflex — the world her stage.

“Yet despite that” — she wilted — “a critical piece of my psyche remained unfinished: I wasn’t free. It had of course to do with my own mother. She was such a terrible scold. Art to her was a competition. I wasn’t going to make that mistake with my child.”

She smiled. “I know you must miss Tatiana, how could you not? But it’s for the best. You’re an authority figure by nature. You can boss her around but it will never work.”

“I wouldn’t dream of trying.”

“Oh, don’t say that, don’t ever say that. What else have we, but our dreams?”

Said the woman in the eight-million-dollar apartment.

“So,” she said, “young, strapping Mr. Edison, what can I do for you? I know you didn’t come here to talk about her. Or did you?” She leaned in. “I do hope you aren’t going to ask me to carry a message to her.”

“I’m not.”

“Good, because I’m enjoined against that. By the rules of rational parenting: we all must make our own choices. Although if you give up that easily, then you don’t deserve her.”