The Kill Clause Part 20

Nyaze Ghartey's concept-a metallic tree, each branch representing a child killed, the crown outstretched protectively like an umbrella-had seemed to Tim pompous and distastefully abstract, but he had to admit now that there was a certain resonance to the sculpture. The framework of the piece was largely complete, though the metal planes had fleshed out only about two-thirds of it. Wood scaffolding covered the structure from top to bottom; the design itself emerged, organic and mysterious, a darker self lurking within the ordered rectangles. The leaves, metal and Bernini-thin, seemed mid-flutter on the branches.

Half a quotation had been chiseled into a flat-sided boulder at the front of the monument: AND THE LEAVES OF THE TREE WERE FOR AND THE LEAVES OF THE TREE WERE FOR To its left a turned-off Sky-Tracker spotlight, the type that shot a mile-high beam of beckoning light at movie premieres and cheesy car sales, sat dormant. Tim could barely make out the small hatch in the trunk of the tree through which the spotlight would slide and illuminate the tree from the interior with the proverbial thousand points of light.

An ambitious task, to outdo the Hollywood sign, but a task accomplished.

Tim walked over and pulled three Buds from the bag. He handed one to Mitch.e.l.l and offered another to Robert, who shook his head. "Can't," he said, rustling in the bag himself and coming up with a Sharp's.

Robert popped the top and took several deep gulps, draining half the bottle. He gazed at the tree before them. "I usually don't like modern c.r.a.p," he said. "But this, this is all right."

"It's like Braque," Mitch.e.l.l said. "All planes and different perspectives. Do you know Braque?"

Robert and Tim shook their heads, and Mitch.e.l.l shrugged off the reference self-consciously. Robert circled slowly, his boots kicking up puffs of dust, drawing close to his brother's side as if by genetic pull. Mitch.e.l.l lit two cigarettes and handed one to Robert, and they smoked and stood side by side, solid and immobile like two inverted triangles of hammered steel, sucking Camels, Mitch.e.l.l with his sleeve-cuffed pack of cigs, Robert with his jacket collar turned up, both of them humming along to "Georgia on My Mind" beneath bristled mustaches as if no one had bothered to show up and tell them the seventies were over. Mitch.e.l.l's face, though less severe than Robert's, held a certain acuteness, a sharpness of perception that Tim had not previously seen. The brothers were beside each other, but Mitch.e.l.l's elbow was in front of Robert's, and he stood square-shouldered while Robert's shoulders tilted slightly toward him in a vague hint of deference.

Robert raised his beer, and the three bottles clinked, a somber toast.

"A glowing tree is nice, but it ain't gonna solve d.i.c.k," he said. "I'll tell you what would make a good memorial. One guilty and unconvicted f.u.c.k swinging from each branch. That's what I'd like. That's the kind of memorial we oughta build for those victims."

"Water the tree with the blood of retribution," Mitch.e.l.l said.

He and his brother laughed at the formality, the bad poetics.

The twins' standing to either side of Tim made him claustrophobic, not just because of their bulk and proximity but because their sameness was disorienting. Mitch.e.l.l sat on the dirt. Robert and Tim followed suit.

"It wears you down," Robert said, "seeing good people take it from the wrong end, seeing the motherf.u.c.kers reign supreme, no remorse, no hesitation, no..."

"-accountability," Mitch.e.l.l said.

"Yeah. A part of me decided after our sister died that I wouldn't lie down no more, and so now I'm standing up, even though it's not what I would of stood up for before. Lesser of two evils and all that. And I've made my decision, and it's the right one, and I'll tell you what-I won't lose a second's sleep over the pieces of s.h.i.+t we execute. Not a f.u.c.kin' second. We gotta stay firm and committed, guys like us. Not give in to c.u.n.ts like Ananberg." Robert tilted his face back and shot a stream of cigarette smoke at the moon, patches of dirt coloring his denim jacket at the elbows. "I guess I see things clearer now, about what needs to get done. It's like we're stuck in this...in this..."

"-conundrum-" Mitch.e.l.l said.

"-where we're f.u.c.ked if we do and we get get f.u.c.ked if we don't." f.u.c.ked if we don't."

"They say the worst cynics are frustrated idealists," Tim said.

Mitch.e.l.l drained his beer and popped a new one. "You think we're cynics?"

"I don't know what you are."

The wind kicked up, making the scaffolding groan, sending red puffs up off the ground.

"We couldn't wait to get started," Robert said. "It's the waiting that kills you. You find out that your little sister was brutally murdered, and then you're..."

"-mired-"

"-in nothingness. Waiting for the investigation, waiting for a suspect to be produced, waiting on forensics, the first court appearance, then the next, then the next...." Robert shook his head. "It's what we hate most of all."

"Now, finally," Mitch.e.l.l said, "we don't have to wait anymore."

Tim mused on this silently.

"Let us in more next time around," Mitch.e.l.l said. "We can handle it. We'll win your trust."

The phone-book intimidation tactic hadn't yielded, so they'd moved to Plan B: ingratiation. Tim was no more swayed by it. "We'll see."

Robert leaned forward abruptly. "What, our work wasn't good enough for you?"

"Your work was fine. Excellent, even."

"Then we want in on the kill. You can't deny us that. We won't won't be denied." Mitch.e.l.l shot Robert a sharp look, but he didn't catch the hint because he was watching Tim closely. "We can help you with your daughter's case," he continued. "With Kindell. Before we vote even, me and Mitch can pay him a little visit. Rattle his cage, bend his elbow, pop a t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e or two. We'll get you whatever answers you want. Who knows-we could even have a hands-on chat with that p.r.i.c.k public defender of his." be denied." Mitch.e.l.l shot Robert a sharp look, but he didn't catch the hint because he was watching Tim closely. "We can help you with your daughter's case," he continued. "With Kindell. Before we vote even, me and Mitch can pay him a little visit. Rattle his cage, bend his elbow, pop a t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e or two. We'll get you whatever answers you want. Who knows-we could even have a hands-on chat with that p.r.i.c.k public defender of his."

Tim stared at them in disbelief, trying to order his thoughts. "That's exactly the opposite of how we need to conduct ourselves." If their faces were any indication, the anger in his voice was startling. "This is not a proceed-at-any-cost operation. It's not about rashness and lawlessness. Neither of you have the first idea what the Commission is actually about about, and you're wondering why I'm reluctant to cut you into the action."

To Tim's surprise neither brother matched his anger. Robert dug at the ground with a stick. "You're right," he said softly. "It's just that your little girl's case, Virginia's case, really"-his cheeks drew up in a half squint, half grimace-"really tore us up. It about broke my f.u.c.kin' heart."

Robert's reaction was completely genuine-it had none of the manipulation Tim had sensed in so much of the brothers' previous maneuvering. The expression of empathy surprised him so thoroughly that his anger deflated at once, leaving him with only the sorrow he saw mirrored back at him from both faces. He got busy playing with his bottle cap so his eyes would have something to look at.

"Now and then, no matter what you've seen, a case sails through all the c.h.i.n.ks in your armor and strikes home." Mitch.e.l.l's throat gave off a rattle when he spoke. "At least our sister lived a few years before getting taken. Not like your little girl."

Robert's face, lit with the distant glow of downtown, was stone-hard with either rage or sclerosed sorrow. "I saw her picture on TV, that clip they ran. The one of her in a pumpkin costume, too big, kept falling down."

"Halloween 2001." Tim's voice was so soft it was barely audible. "My wife tried to st.i.tch the costume. She's not very domestic."

"She was a great kid, Virginia," Robert said with an almost aggressive adamancy. "I could tell, even just from what I saw."

Tim understood for the first time that the brothers weren't simply justifying their desire to kill criminals, but that they'd taken Ginny's death personally, as they took each of the Commission's cases personally. Their sister remained frozen in time, locked in a h.e.l.lish script, to be rekilled in their minds every time a murderer escaped justice. While this made them flawed partic.i.p.ants for a cause that called for objectivity and circ.u.mspection, Tim couldn't deny a certain grat.i.tude for their brute emotionality. He grasped at last the note of affection, even admiration, hidden in Dumone's voice when he spoke of them. They mourned with a hurt-animal purity uncomplicated by law or ethic. Maybe they mourned as Tim and Dumone wished they themselves were capable of doing.

Robert's words drew Tim from his thoughts. "She had the look, man," he continued, "the one that the motherf.u.c.kers must get after, like she was too pure to stick around this s.h.i.+tty planet too long." He drained his beer and hurled the bottle. It shattered against a pile of stacked metal sheets. "Beth Ann had that look, too."

He tipped his face down into the waiting points of his thumb and forefinger, and he stayed like that, squeezing his eyes, silent. Mitch.e.l.l leaned over, hooked his brother's neck with a hand, and pulled him forward until the tops of their heads were touching, just above their foreheads.

Tim watched them, his face numb with dread. "It doesn't get any easier," he said. He had intended it as a question.

Robert pulled his head back. His eyes were red from being rubbed, yet they held not tears, but rage. The dark scaffolding creaked behind him in the wind.

Mitch.e.l.l leaned back, propped on two elbow-locked arms, his face barely visible in the darkness. "The average s.e.xual a.s.sault by an anger-excitation rapist lasts four hours," he said. "Beth Ann wasn't so lucky."

After that they drank in silence.

*After Mitch.e.l.l dropped him at his car, Tim drove back to his apartment cautiously, watching his signals and abiding the speed limit. The radio was abuzz with talk of the execution. From the faces of other drivers, he could tell who was listening to the news and who was discussing it on their cell phones. He even thought he sensed a different mood in the air, as if the city itself had received an adrenaline jolt, absorbed by osmosis from the fallout caused by Lane's death. The night seemed exciting and excited, alive with the animation of risk and high stakes. A proximity to death always brought with it an attendant heightening of the senses.

Joshua was struggling across the lobby with an ornately carved picture frame. He paused when Tim entered, setting it on the floor. Blue TV light flickered in his tiny office, as always.

"Wait, wait!" he shrieked, as if Tim were fleeing. "I have paperwork for you." He leaned the frame against the wall and disappeared into his small office, reappearing with a rental agreement made out to the ever-reliable Tom Altman.

He waited as Tim reviewed it, a finger bearing an immense agate stone coming to rest on the side of his chin. "Cute beard."

"Thanks."

"Did you hear about the guy who got his head blown up on the news?"

"There was something about it on the radio."

"Right-winger." Joshua's hand rose to his mouth, s.h.i.+elding a stage whisper. "One down, fifty million to go."

Upstairs Tim entered his apartment, taking note of the deadness of the air within. It took him about ten minutes with lukewarm sink water and a razor to eradicate his emergent beard.

He opened the window, then sat cross-legged on the floor and thought about what, at age thirty-three, he had in his life. A mattress, a desk, a gun, bullets. A car with fraudulent plates previously owned by a drug runner.

He cleaned his gun again, though it was already clean, oiling, polis.h.i.+ng, punching the bore brush through the holes in the cylinder. Each punch of the brush he accompanied with a word describing what he could have done to Kindell in the garage. Murder. Slay. Execute. Sacrifice. Destroy. Slaughter.

The Lane execution had not just righted a judicial wrong, he reminded himself, it had brought him one case closer to Kindell. And to the secret of Ginny's death.

After checking the Nokia, he was surprised by the keenness of his disappointment that he had no messages. Dray had not called since he'd left the notes at the house, which stung like h.e.l.l. It also meant she'd gathered no further information on the case. When he called, he got the machine. He called back just to hear her voice again, then hung up.

He found himself dialing Bear's number.

"Where the h.e.l.l you been, Rack?"

"Sorting things out, I guess."

"Well, sort faster. The disappearing act isn't sitting so hot with Dray. Or with me."

"How is she?" Only now did Tim grasp his true motivation for phoning Bear. Tim Rackley, Master of High School Social Dynamics.

"Ask her yourself," Bear said. "And while we're at it, what's your new phone number?"

"I don't have one yet." Tim walked over near the open window. "I'm calling from a pay phone. Still lining out a more permanent place."

"I want to see you."

"Now's not the greatest-"

"Listen, either you can agree to see me, or I'll come track your a.s.s down. And you know I will. What's it gonna be?"

A breeze, contaminated with heat from the alley-backing kitchen below, swept away the dusty smell of the room, if only temporarily. Tim breathed in the amalgam of cool and breath-hot air. The distant touch of a headache cramped him at the temples.

"All right then," Bear said. "Yamas.h.i.+ro, early dinner, tomorrow at five-thirty."

He hung up before waiting for Tim to agree.

Tim lay on the mattress, enveloped in darkness. When he dozed off, he dreamed of Ginny. She was laughing at him, pet.i.te fingers covering her child-s.p.a.ced teeth.

He couldn't figure out why.

20.

YAMAs.h.i.+RO, A j.a.pANESE restaurant perched atop a hill in East Hollywood, looks down over its steep-sloped front gardens to the distant neon flash of the Boulevard and Sunset. Through the miasma of smog and car exhaust spread low along the Strip, Britney Spears threw a five-foot gaze from a building-side banner ad, all wide grin and vacant eyes, a Dr. T.J. Eckleburg for the aught decade.

About two years back, Tim and Bear had collared a fugitive who'd injured Kose Nagura's wife in a jewelry-store heist, and the restaurant manager had shown his gratefulness in the form of ceaseless imploration for them to dine at his restaurant free of charge. Despite their discomfort at the place's specious high-cla.s.s ambience and raw-fish fare, they tried to take him up on his offer at least once every few months to avoid insulting him. Besides, the drinks were good, the view from the hilltop bar was the most spectacular in all of L.A., and the building-an exact replica of a grand Kyoto palace-had a certain majestic appeal.

Tim wound his car up the precipitous snaking drive to the restaurant and left it with the valet. As usual, Kose seated him at the best table immediately upon his entering, a four-top at the restaurant's southeast apex, where gla.s.s wall meets gla.s.s wall, providing a panoramic view of the smoldering billboard-and smog-draped buildings below-a view of the L.A. that the Mastersons deplored. The cra.s.s money-and fame-grubbing sprawl of middle-cla.s.s aspiration for stardom, an asphaltopolis that raised child stars as tall as buildings and rewarded greed and ruthlessness, a town where rapists and child-killers could gorge their appet.i.tes in like company.

Tim played with the straw in his water gla.s.s, waiting for Bear, rehearsing all the dumb things he knew he was going to say in hope of discovering better wording. A couple to his left was holding hands across the table, casually, as if their easy-found affection were something to be taken for granted, something found everywhere, like frustration, like smog, like aspiring actors. He sensed the deep tug of his need to be with his wife. He reframed his thoughts, deciding what he would impart to Bear, the messenger. A white flag, perhaps.

Bear appeared, a large form in gray polyester pants and a just-mismatched blazer, stretching past one of the sliding shoji walls leading from the inner courtyard. Tim stood, and they embraced, Bear holding him for an extra beat before sliding into his chair.

Tim nodded at Bear's rumpled suit. "You'd better hurry up and get that thing back on the body. The wake's at seven."

"Clever."

"Court duty?"

"Yup. Tannino found out I bet against Italy in the World Cup last year, so he stuck it to me. Two days before I can go out-of-pocket again." Bear's face seemed to move and settle into an expression of weariness. "There's no way for me to say this, so I'm just gonna spit it out." He paused. "If you don't knock off the strong, silent routine, Dray's gonna figure out she's fine without you."

"What does that mean?"

"While you've been MIA, Dray's been going through Ginny's stuff, getting out of the house, seeing friends. She doing this on her own. You sure you want her to?"

"Of course I don't want her to. But we don't know how to do it together."

"Doesn't seem like you're knocking yourself out trying." Bear picked up the paper-hat-folded napkin, then set it back down. "Are you having an affair?"

Tim fought to find impa.s.sivity. "Bear, I understand you're trying to help, but this isn't really-"

"What? My business? Let me tell you what is is my business. You may not embarra.s.s your wife. It's your right to embarra.s.s yourself all you want, but Dray's been through enough. You're not gonna drag her through more." my business. You may not embarra.s.s your wife. It's your right to embarra.s.s yourself all you want, but Dray's been through enough. You're not gonna drag her through more."

"Bear. I'm not having an affair."

"I talk to Dray every day. And I'm getting a weird vibe from her when your name comes up, like she doesn't trust what you're up to. Plus, if you hadn't Houdinied on her, I hardly think she'd need-" He stopped. Pulled the napkin from the table and smoothed it across his lap, eyes lowered and regretful.

"She'd need...?"

Bear's hands paused. "Mac. She's had some really bad nights. Mac slept over a few times-not like that, just on the couch-to see her through."

"Mac?" Tim snapped his chopsticks apart and frictioned off the splinters. Hard. "Why didn't she call you?" Tim snapped his chopsticks apart and frictioned off the splinters. Hard. "Why didn't she call you?"

"Because I'm still your partner first and foremost. Mac's one of hers. And that's the wrong d.a.m.n question. The correct question is, why didn't she call you? you?"