Jefferson Parker - The Fallen

I thought that Garrett knew his shooter. I thought Garrett had agreed to meet him – or her – and while he was waiting, he was taken out. I thought the shooter’s name would be right there, in the trail of Garrett’s recent investigations. I thought of what Stella had said when we asked about enemies.

Hundreds .

I closed the murder book, wondering if Carrie Ann Martier was working right now.

At midnight I walked around the house. I grew up in this home, so every space and corner is packed with memories. Gina and I were very fortunate to be able to buy it from my parents several years ago, before the real estate market really topped out. We couldn’t have done it without my folks’ help – they wanted a low-maintenance condominium, so they made us a good deal and carried the paper at a low interest rate. It’s small and old but in good repair because both my father and I are handy with household tools. It’s grown in value.

Our Normal Heights neighborhood is fairly nice and convenient. It got its name from a teachers college, or normal school, that used to be here. I went to elementary and junior high just a few blocks away. Hit my first home run at the Little League field. Hung out with Gary and Jim and Rick. Fell in love with Linda when I was ten and Kathy when I was eleven and Janet when I was thirteen. They all lived within a mile. After Gina and I were married she lobbied hard for a high-rise condo downtown by the bay, but the rents are astronomical down there. The one she wanted was twenty-eight hundred a month. The rent on our first place here in Normal Heights was fourteen hundred plus gas and electric but you got trash pickup and a garage. Two years later I was happy to buy my childhood home, though I understood Gina’s lack of enthusiasm. It is not a high-rise by the bay.

I tried to imagine this place without Gina in it and it was difficult because I knew that she would come back and we would take care of whatever was bothering her. Gina teases me sometimes about trying to fix the unfixable. Once I dropped a dinner plate, which shattered badly, but I glued it back together. It took hours, gathering the shards and wondering which tiny triangle or sliver fits with another. The repaired plate was ugly and incomplete and useless and really kind of funny. Actually, it worked okay collecting runoff under a potted plant out on the back patio.

Gina called around one o’clock. She was crying and I had trouble making sense of what she said except that she was sorry. I told her I would come get her but she refused to tell me where she was. I heard no voices or noise in the background. She sounded very alone.

She said she was sorry again, and then she hung up.

The man who threw me out of the Las Palmas Hotel is named Vic Malic and he lives in a rented room in the Gaslamp Quarter. It’s not far from the former Las Palmas, which was rebuilt as an Execu-Suites.

After his arrest Vic was overwhelmed with grief at what he’d done and he waived his right to a trial, pleading down to charges of aggravated assault, arson, public endangerment, larceny, and destruction of property.

He was somber and repentant during the proceeding and he explained himself with apparent honesty. He had been under terrible stress at the time. He was recently separated from his wife of six months, had gone bankrupt, and had just been denied his World Wrestling Federation certification, which would have allowed him to work. Apparently he had hurt a fellow wrestler during his tryout match, resulting in an unofficial black-balling of his career. He was down to his last sixty dollars. He had consumed nearly a liter of gin on the day he set the hotel on fire. He had no idea the natural gas submain that ran behind the sixth-floor rooms would blow. He had fully intended to jump out his window when the flames got bad enough but he had lost his courage after seeing me rip through the awning below. A suicide note had supported his story. In the end Vic had walked downstairs, looked down at me, and surrendered to a fireman.

I noticed him in the courtroom one day at lunch. The deputies had legcuffed him to a table in Courtroom Eight, then gone off to have lunch in the cafeteria. This was an accepted practice until a man on trial for stabbing a fourteen-year-old girl to death had slipped out of his cuffs and walked outside a free man. Now the San Diego accused are never left alone at lunch.

Anyway, I was walking by the courtroom and saw him through the door window, examining a sandwich that looked tiny in his huge hand. I went in and Vic hung his head and tried to turn away, though the leg cuffs didn’t leave him much wiggle room. It was my first time alone with him. I wasn’t sure what I was going to say, and the huge fury I had hoped to feel never came to me.

We talked for just a minute. It was very strange to be close to him again, close to that face that had been burned into my memory in such vivid detail. For a moment I smelled fire, and my heart beat wildly. He could hardly look at me. He asked if I could ever forgive him and I said sure, I forgive you right now, for whatever it’s worth.

‘I’ve got no grudge,’ I said. ‘But you shouldn’t take out your problems on other people. Even a child knows that.’

He was shaking his head, still looking down. ‘No. No, I’ll never do that again. I swear to God. Never, ever.’

When he told me that, it was approximately two months after throwing me from the window. And when he spoke, his words were accompanied by an outpouring of pale blue ovals. Since the fall I had been seeing a lot of pale blue ovals when people spoke and I was just beginning to understand that they meant sincerity.

So I believed him. I also know that insane people can be very believable and there was some doubt as to Vic Malic’s sanity. Two psychiatrists gave depositions, one for and one against him, but the actual condition of Vic’s mental health remained vague and disputed.

The next day, by coincidence, I had to be in court on another case. I’d bought a roach-coach burrito and was looking for a place to eat it in private and walked by Courtroom Eight to find Vic chained to the table again, fiddling with another tiny sandwich. So we had lunch together. He was an oddly gentle conversationalist, very curious and nonjudgmental. We talked mostly about the pro-wrestling circuit and his hope of getting that certification someday. Vic had begun a fitness program in his cell and he was already up to a thousand sit-ups and five hundred push-ups a day. He looked strong.

During the hearing, old Judge Milt Gardner listened with his usual wrinkled calm. Vic’s public defender noted that there was no loss of life, only two minor injuries besides my own – which was, thank God, far less damaging than it first appeared – and the aging, long-out-of-code Las Palmas was actually being wooed by Execu-Suites at the time of the fire. Vic’s apology to me and the court was lengthy and very moving. He said so many nice things about me I sort of wished he would stop. Gardner questioned Vic in depth, and I never sensed dishonesty in him. I never saw any shapes and colors that didn’t match his words.

Vic was given seven years in the state prison up in Corcoran. A few months in, he helped expose a ring of correctional officers who were staging fights between the inmates and betting on them. As an almost-professional wrestler Vic was heavily pressured to fight, but he turned state’s witness instead. It was an ugly story, went on for weeks, made the papers and TV.

He was released two and a half months ago, the day before Christmas, for good behavior and for helping to crack the fight ring.

I met Vic at the Higher Grounds coffee shop around the corner from his place. He lives on the fourth floor of his building, and though he’s invited me, I’ve never had the courage to go up and see how he lives. I like him, but I still can’t imagine being in the same room with him again, four stories up from the pavement. I’ve met him once a week for coffee, always on Fridays like today, for a couple of months now. It was Vic’s idea but I agreed to it. He needs me more than I need him and that’s okay, though we quickly run out of things to say.