Perfect killer

CHAPTER 20

While I pondered the mysterious missing Blackberry, Jasmine sped past the turnoff.

"That was our turn," I said, pointing behind us to the left.

"No problem." She slowed for a turn lane, then hit the brakes hard enough for my shoulder belt's inertial catch to grab as she steered the Mercedes through a 180 and headed back.

"What Blackberry?"

She reached the turnoff and I pointed toward the parking lot next to Jambalaya's berth. We pulled into the lot and found a parking space next to my battered three-quarterton Chevy pickup with the off-road roll bar and sheet metal sculpted by a decade's worth of encounters with a wide assortment of near misses and tight squeezes with high-Sierra trees and granite boulders.

"Impressive," she said, looking up at my truck. "Perfect for L.A. freeways."

"Nobody tries to crowd me when I merge."

She nodded and turned off the ignition. "Nothing to lose."

"Pardon?"

"They take one look and know you've got nothing to lose and they let you in, right?"

"Something like that."

"That's such a totally contra-L.A. thing."

I shrugged.

"No, really." She leaned over and placed her hand on my forearm; her touch felt electric. "That's very cool." She paused, and in the silence the sounds of engines and tortured tires grew louder.

"The jackals are coming," she said. "Give me a ride and tell me about the Blackberry."

We transferred everything to my pickup. I cranked up the big-block V-8 and pulled out of the parking lot. The light was red at Admiralty Way.

"Duck down." I faced away from the onrushing surge of television vehicles as Jasmine slumped down in her seat. Nobody gave my battered truck a second glance. I didn't have a plan yet, so I took the easy path and turned south on Lincoln.

"Could Mom have slipped something in your pocket there in the cemetery and you didn't remember?"

"I suppose. Everything happened really quickly and I could have easily missed something. Our brains can only handle focusing on one thing at a time We switch back and forth between things so fast we think we're multitasking, but it's an illusion."

"Mom always told me it was impossible to have a conversation with you without learning something."

I looked over at her.

"Mom was right," she said.

Jasmine gave me her mother's smile again and, with no warning, opened up an epic blockbuster of a memory. The vision nailed me with fine holographic details like one of those incredible black-and-white Ansel Adams photos where you can see the needles on a Jeffrey pine all the way across Lake Tahoe way up on the top of the distant Sierra ridges.

Jasmine's smile did that. It brought me face-to-face with that fateful Christmas party so long ago. Vanessa opened the door as if she had watched me come up the walk, and when I stepped in, she stood so close I felt the heat from her face and savored the aroma of Doublemint gum on her breath. I recalled the fine variegated color detail in her eyes as she focused on mine, holding my gaze right down to the last instant, when I had to turn away from the moment that would have been our first kiss had the house not been jammed with people.

This memory struck me now, as I drove my truck and Vanessa's daughter across the Ballona Creek bridge. All of this seized my thoughts so completely that I ran the stoplight at Jefferson.

"Oh, hell." I slowed down, half-expecting to see the lights of a police car, then realizing it was unlikely in the dead of night.

Emotions careered wildly about in my head, then suddenly distilled themselves; I visualized the heap of bloody clothes I had stuffed into a plastic bag in my Mississippi motel room after Mama's funeral.

"Hold on? I said quietly at first.

Jasmine looked at me expectantly.

"Whoa! That's got to be it."

I slammed on the brakes and hung a U-turn.

"If it's anywhere, it'll be in the suit I wore at my mother's funeral."

"The Blackberry?"

I nodded. "It's the only possible thing."

I replayed the scene in Itta Bena once again. Only this time I had trouble focusing on Vanessa's face. It came to me now as one of those hyperpixelated images you get when you enlarge a digital photo too much.

Excitedly, I described things to Jasmine, slowly struggling to relate every detail as I drove north along Lincoln, making most of the green lights and easing through the reds. I visualized the cracked concrete in the garage of our little stucco beach house in Playa Del Rey a block from the ocean where the music of the surf rode the ocean breezes through the open windows on warm summer evenings. My mind saw the washer and dryer and the kids' bicycles and my workbench and the tools and the stacks of boxes I had packed when I had briefly thought of selling the place after the accident. But mostly I fixed on the plastic bag from the hotel room in Jackson all knotted up around the bloody new suit.

"How could you possibly have hung on to that?"

I shrugged. "Memories. Why does the Catholic Church hang on to the bones and other relics of saints?"

"Perversity?"

I laughed. "Okay, that's why I didn't toss it."

When I pulled the truck into the driveway of the white, 1930s, art deco bungalow with the giant jade plants and the white picket fence guarding the little postage stamp of fescue in front, I knew at once everything was all wrong.