Fidelity

7

Ray Hall found a parking space near the courthouse complex on Van Nuys Boulevard, walked past the bail-bond shops and the stores playing Mexican music through their open doors, and down Delano Street to the police station. He went in to visit Al Campbell, the homicide cop. They talked about Campbell’s wife, who grew up in Ray Hall’s neighborhood, and about the strategy of the Dodgers, who were consistently beaten by players they had brought up, taught, and then traded to other teams. Then Hall asked him if he knew Gruenthal, the detective who had drawn the Kramer case, and Campbell took Hall to the next office to introduce him.

Gruenthal and Ray got coffee and sat down on opposite sides of Gruenthal’s desk to talk. Gruenthal showed him the drawings and photographs of the crime scene and asked him the obvious questions: what case Phil had been working on, which old cases had left someone angry, what vices he’d had, what his relationships with women were like.

When they had each told each other what they knew, it was clear that they didn’t know much. Hall said, “I’ll let you know if I find out anything,” but Gruenthal didn’t make the same promise.

The conversation exhausted Ray Hall’s will to talk. He was in the middle of a hangover, with a head that was pounding and lightsensitive eyes that had stopped producing moisture and stuck to his eyelids when he blinked. He had been expecting to show up at the office this morning only long enough to pick up his belongings and then go back home to bed, but now he was forced to think.

He decided to find a place to think where the sun wasn’t in his eyes. It had to be one where people spoke English, because he had no idea how to say “shut up” in Spanish, and his head hurt. He stopped at a restaurant he knew called The Sea Grill on Van Nuys not far from the agency office and sat at the bar. The bartender was a middleaged man who seemed to believe that the most important part of his job was cleaning the brass, wood, and glass for the evening, but he managed to pour Ray Hall a glass of scotch.

Hall drank half of it quickly, letting it burn down his throat, and almost immediately began to feel its anesthetic qualities. Then he took small sips and thought about Phil Kramer. Hall had known Phil for ten years, but nothing about his death made any sense to him.

Phil Kramer was big and aggressive, the kind of detective who would smile as he approached a man he wanted to talk to, and then stand too close to him when he asked questions. But he wasn’t a bully, and he wasn’t the sort of man who would forget that a bullet could kill him. Ray Hall had been with him on a number of investigations, and Phil had been careful. If he left his car in a dangerous neighborhood, he would return to it by a different route and see if he found anybody watching for him.

Despite his size, he was good at keeping a low profile. He dressed in drab colors, usually wore a nylon windbreaker, seldom a sport coat because cops and private detectives wore them. He could fade into a crowd of strangers, assess their posture and facial expressions, and imitate them. He would often start a conversation so he would appear to be one of the group instead of an outsider.

He was a credible liar. He never used a simple lie, always a story. When he pretended to be a deliveryman, he acted tired and irritated, a middleaged guy forced to moonlight to pay off a debt. When he pretended to be a lawyer, he was an unethical overpaid one with the perfect amount of swagger and unfounded self-regard. That was his secret: an understanding of credulity. He let people assume the things he wanted them to believe. He didn’t make some bogus claim and then stare into a person’s eyes without blinking, like a bad poker player. Most people didn’t want to stare into anyone’s eyes like that. They wanted to be lazy and comfortable, and Phil Kramer let them.

Phil had always seemed too careful to be murdered in an ambush. And why would anyone want to kill him? Phil Kramer wasn’t anybody’s enemy. He was a mercenary. Nobody hired a private detective until he was pretty sure he knew what the detective would find. His clients were wives who already knew their husbands were getting laid somewhere else, lawyers who wanted to bolster the evidence in lawsuits that had already been filed, businessmen who already knew somebody was skimming the cash receipts. It wasn’t as though killing Phil would end somebody’s troubles. Phil Kramer had been in the business of proving what people already knew.

Hall had been withholding something from the investigators. He had been acting as though he believed the theory that Phil had been on a case when he was killed. That was what everybody on the outside assumed: Detective Gruenthal, Emily. But at the back of Ray Hall’s mind there was a feeling that the idea wasn’t quite right.

The thought brought Hall to a tangle of complications. After Phil got out of the marines over twenty years ago, he went to work as a trainee at Sam Bowen’s agency until he got his license, then founded his own agency. At first he had worked cases alone. Emily would answer the phones, do the billing and filing, and probably write the reports for the clients.

When Sam Bowen closed his own detective agency, Phil had hired Sam to work for him. A couple of years later, he had hired Ray Hall. Ray had been inexperienced then, and he had tagged along with Phil or Sam at first and, in time, had learned to work on his own. As the business grew, Phil added people. He always hired young men who were physically rugged and had a reasonable level of untrained intelligence. He let them work their three years as trainees and tested them by giving them the worst jobs. They were the ones who sat watching an apartment building for seventy-two hours, or went through a neighborhood every day at three A.M. writing down the license numbers of the parked cars, and then spent the rest of the day at the DMV filling out forms to obtain the owners’ names. When the trainees were ready, he would give them cases of their own and hire new trainees. Phil ran his agency like a pyramid scheme.

As the years went by, the young detectives got better and Phil Kramer got lazier and more careful about putting himself in dangerous places. First he stopped taking the hardest cases for himself. Eventually he stopped working cases with the young apprentices to teach them how things were done. Instead, he relied on Hall or Dewey Burns to take them on. Over the past year, he seemed to have lost all interest in the agency. He had let five of the other detectives go off on their own and had not replaced them. Bill Przwalski was now the only trainee, even though there were a dozen applicants a week calling April and asking for the chance to work for a license.

Phil still showed up at work every day, but he often left without telling anybody where he was going. The idea that what he was doing when he wasn’t in the office was working cases had never occurred to Ray Hall. When Ray had heard Phil Kramer had been shot, it had taken a minute or two before he could even concede that his death could possibly have anything to do with a case.

There were other complications to the task of investigating Phil Kramer’s murder. As Hall sat in the bar sipping his second drink, he pictured Emily Kramer at the retirement party the night before Sam Bowen moved to Seattle. Everyone in the agency liked Sam Bowen, and everyone had benefited from Bowen’s vast circle of snitches, cops, lawyers, bail bondsmen, and stringers. Emily Kramer had been grateful to Bowen because she still went over the books in the early years, and she knew what he had contributed to Phil’s income and hers.

The party had been loud and jovial and chaotic at times, but it lapsed into periods of quiet, earnest talk about the past and the future. There had been an edge to these discussions because Sam Bowen said he was sixty-eight years old, but he was actually older. People at the party knew that once Sam Bowen was a thousand miles from L.A., they weren’t likely to see him again.

Late in the evening, Ray happened to be out in a corridor with a group of people, and everyone seemed to go off to get a fresh drink at the same time except Ray and Emily Kramer. She was a woman who didn’t wear much makeup or bother with hair and clothes during the day. For years she had been a housewife and the mother of a son who needed to be driven to practice for some sport every day. But that night she had worn a red dress with a low neckline and made of a fabric that clung to her a bit more than she probably knew. She placed her hand on Ray Hall’s forearm. Her hand felt light, almost as though he were imagining her. But she blocked his way, stood close, and looked up into his eyes. “Tell me, Ray. I need the truth. Is Phil cheating on me?”

Hall’s mind stalled. He had liked Emily Kramer since the day he first saw her. She always seemed so alert and quick, and it was fun to hear her talk. But it was her physical grace and the shape of her body that made it hard for him to look away from her, even when he knew he was taking a risk to look. And he knew that she thought about him, too. He couldn’t be sure of the nature of her thoughts because there was always some wishful thinking in his mind, and friendships between men and women always incorporated some slight sexual attraction, but he was sure she felt something extra for him.

Asking him whether her husband was cheating told him so much that he couldn’t examine all of the new information at once. She was revealing to Ray that things weren’t going well between her and Phil, and that she trusted Ray not to betray her confidence to anyone. She trusted him not to think unflattering thoughts about her for her indiscretion in asking, or for her inability to keep a husband interested in her. She was implying that she was so close to Ray that he would tell her the truth just because she asked not to be spared. And he sensed without being able to analyze it, that if the answer was yes, then she would find a way to sleep with him tonight. But he knew it would be out of anger at Phil, not a desire for Ray Hall. In the years since then, he had thought about that moment a thousand times.

After a second, he gave her a wry, amused grin. “Jesus Christ, Emily. Look at you. How could he be cheating?”

But the hand she had placed on his arm tightened, so he was afraid he would spill his drink and draw attention to them. She said, “I really need to know, Ray. It matters.”

“I don’t know.” It was the only answer that didn’t need to be defended or shored up with evidence.

Emily stared at him. Maybe she already knew that regardless of what the truth was, he could never tell her Phil was cheating. She held his arm for a few more seconds, said, “Thanks, Ray,” turned and joined the group in the main office. Ten minutes later, he went to find her, but found out that she and Phil had both left. Whether they left together or apart he never knew, because she had arrived in her own car after the office closed to bring some of the refreshments.

Now Phil was dead, and Ray Hall was the one Emily had asked to find out what had happened to him. He held up his glass and looked at the amber liquid inside, thought about the peculiar beauty of the whiskey with the light behind it, and then set the glass down on the bar. He took out a twenty-dollar bill, slipped it under the glass, and walked out of the restaurant into the sunshine.

He had left his car parked along the street. As he approached it, a woman got out of the car parked at the curb ahead of his: Emily Kramer. She leaned on the door of his car, her arms folded, until he was beside her. “Hi, Ray.”

“You’re right,” he said. “I was in the bar. You caught me.” He took out his car keys.

She didn’t move. “You could tell me a soothing lie. You were interviewing somebody. I’d accept it even now.”

“That’s probably why I won’t lie to you.”

She looked up the block, then behind her. “Have you got anything at all yet?”

“I talked to Gruenthal, the lead homicide detective, a little while ago. He had the autopsy report and the crime-scene stuff.”

“I don’t want to stand around in the middle of the street while we do this. Why don’t you take me for a ride?”

“Okay.” He pressed the button on his key chain to unlock the doors, then hesitated. “I’ve been drinking.”

“I’m aware of that. You want me to drive?”

“No. I just thought I should say it.”

“Thank you.” She slid into the passenger seat and closed the door.

He got in and drove north up Van Nuys Boulevard. “It pretty much agrees with what we heard before. It was after one A.M. Phil was walking up the sidewalk on Shoshone Street two blocks north of Victory. His car was parked on a dark, quiet stretch. He opened the door of his car, the dome light came on, and he got behind the wheel. There was a van parked across the street. Knowing Phil, I think he probably noticed the van parked in that spot when he arrived, and nothing about it looked different, so he figured it was harmless. But the shooter had broken into the van, hidden inside, and waited for him. The only shot hit Phil through the head, so he never felt it.”

“You don’t need to do that,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Tell me things to make me feel better about how he died. I need to know what he was doing there when he was shot.”

CCUy?”

“A million reasons. I’m Phil’s wife-his widow. I loved him. And I owe him that. Everybody has a right to have somebody care at least that much when he dies. He has a right to have somebody ask questions-who did this to him and why they would want to.”

“What else?”

“What do you mean?”

“You said there were a million reasons.”

“I didn’t say I was going to tell you all of them.”

Hall drove a block in silence. “He was up there north of Victory around one, but so far nobody knows what he was working on. It’s a residential street, but there are big apartment buildings on Victory. There’s also a golf course, a couple of good-sized schoolyards, and Balboa Park, all good places to meet somebody at night.”

“You don’t think he was out meeting an informant. You think it was a woman, don’t you?”

He took a deep breath, then blew it out slowly. “I haven’t said that. Is that what this is about?”

“Come on, Ray. How can it not be about that? My husband was shot to death in an ambush on a residential street at one A.M. I’ve looked at every case file I could find, and I don’t see a current case that had anything to do with Shoshone Street. I don’t see anything in anybody’s Rolodex or on anybody’s computer that would send him up there. Do you?”

“Not so far.”

“Have you found anything that would tell you that he was working on a case at all?”

“Not yet. How about you? Have you searched your house?”

“Of course I have. Knowing Phil, I thought he would have left something where I would be sure to find it-maybe with the papers you have to look at when a person dies. I looked everywhere, but there’s nothing so far-no addresses near where they found him, no mysterious phone numbers, nothing. Now I’m looking for hiding places.”

“What about the cars?”

“I checked mine. The reason the police still have Phil’s is that they’re checking it.”

“I still haven’t figured out why Phil was keeping this a secret,” Ray said.

“Because he had something big to hide. Now take me back to my car. We both have work to do.”