Telling Lies

Chapter Twenty-Three

I woke up first. Casey was sprawled over more than her share of the bed, sound asleep, with a little drool drying at the side of her mouth. She’s too old and teenagery to cuddle in bed anymore. Risking her wrath, I brushed her long hair from her face and kissed her forehead. Then I dragged myself up.

My first coherent thought was that there were only two more days until Christmas. I had promised my mother I would be home in time. Now, with Casey here, I couldn’t think of many reasons to stay in L.A. any longer.

I wasn’t doing the investigation much good, but I still had some business to take care of Emily’s apartment needed to be closed up. Whatever had begun between Mike Flint and me needed some resolution. Both of those, I decided, might best be dealt with after the holidays. My film crew wasn’t leaving for Ireland until the middle of January. If I was very organized about preparations for the trip, I could maybe squeeze off a few days after the First and come back to L.A.

I went into the bathroom and pulled the tape off the gauze covering my stitches, losing a few hairs in the process. The stitches didn’t look too bad, but they were still stitches, so, after I combed my hair, I cut a new piece of gauze to cover them up again. I was taping the gauze down when Casey, yawning and stretching, came in and leaned against the sink beside me.

“What did you do to your head?” she asked, squinting without her glasses.

“I bumped it.”

“How?”

I looked at her sleepy face in the mirror. “The usual way. I was running from a man who was trying to shoot at me from Aunt Emily’s Volvo. When he fired the first shot, it set off a bomb in the car that had so much force that it set afire six cars, including Uncle Max’s BMW, threw me into the air and then dumped me on my head. That’s how.”

“Uh huh,” she yawned. “You always tell the stupidest stories, Mom.”

“I try my best to entertain you,” I said. “Feel like breakfast?”

“I’m starved.”

“Do you have anything to wear besides ski pants?”

“I have some jeans in my backpack.”

“Go call Daddy, then get dressed. We’ll use some of his money and eat out, anywhere you like.”

“What am I going to say to him?”

“Try the truth.”

“What if he gets mad?”

“Start crying and hang up. Always works for me.”

“You are so weird, Mom.” She went into Emily’s study and shut the door. I was sorely tempted to pick up the extension and eavesdrop. As I made up the sofa bed, I actually touched the receiver two or three times. It’s a good thing the conversation didn’t last very long, or I would have lost all self-respect.

Casey came out dressed in jeans and a blue sweater just the color of her eyes.

“How’d it go?” I asked.

She shrugged. “He apologized for Linda. He’s sending me a check.”

“A check for what?”

She raised her hands, perplexed. “You know the man better than I do.”

At least she was smiling again. She’s a resilient kid, but she’s taken a number of good bounces during the course of the last couple of years. I always worry that the next trauma will be one too many.

“Where do you want to eat?” she asked.

“How about, we call Uncle Max at the Bonaventure and have him join us,” I said. “He knows about his car, but I haven’t faced him yet. If you’re there, he won’t get as mad at me.”

“What happened to his car?”

“I told you. It burst into flames when the man driving Aunt Emily’s Volvo took a shot at me and set off a bomb.”

“Right,” she said, but the sarcasm held just a tinge of doubt.

“Moms don’t tell lies,” I said. I put my arm around her and led her out the door.

I called Max to meet us. Then Casey and I caught the Dash bus up to the Bonaventure on Figueroa. By the time we got there, Max had a table in the hotel coffee shop and had already ordered juice and coffee for us. When he spotted Casey behind me, he jumped up and wrapped her in a bear hug, swung her around a couple of times, imperiling a goodly number of water glasses and coffee cups with her long legs.

“You’re one hell of a good-looking kid, kid,” he said. “You look like a stretch model of your mother when she was your age. I think you’re going to be as tall as your Aunt Emily.”

Casey lifted a corner of her lip with dismay and looked at me. “How tall is Aunt Emily?”

“Six feet.”

“Gross.” She broke free of Max and slumped into a cushy chair. “I don’t like being taller than everybody.”

“You will,” Max said. He sat down and took one of her hands. “How was skiing?”

She rolled her eyes. “Don’t say snow to me, and don’t mention skiing.”

He turned to me and laughed. “Deja vu. That’s you exactly at twelve. Chip off the old block, Maggie.”

I poured myself a cup of coffee. “Glad to see you in such good humor, Max. After what happened to your car, I was afraid you would come gunning for me, too.”

Very swiftly, he became deadly serious. “My God, Maggot. Are you okay?”

“Do I look okay?”

He leaned back and gave me a good going over. Then he smiled again. “You look a hell of a lot better than my car.”

“I’m sorry, Max,” I said.

“Forget it.”

Casey had been listening to this exchange while she drank her juice and then chased it with mine. “What did happen to your car, Uncle Max?”

“I told you,” I said.

“Let’s eat,” Max said. I saw a deep furrow appear between his heavy brows before he hid behind his menu. I touched his arm.

“You okay?”

“I think you should take Casey and go home, Maggie,” he said with a husky voice. “Every time I even think about what happened to you yesterday, or what might have happened…”

“If we can get a flight, we’ll leave L.A. this afternoon. Okay with you, Casey?”

“Sure.” She was looking between Max and me, borrowing Max’s serious mood.

“Let’s eat,” I said.

Casey ate eggs Benedict, a short stack of pancakes, a side of bacon, and finished my bran muffin. Max, lingering over half a grapefruit and dry whole-wheat toast, watched her with amusement.

“Want some dessert, Casey?” he asked when she folded her napkin beside her plate.

“Dessert for breakfast?” she asked brightly.

“He’s teasing,” I said. “Are you ready?”

“Yes. I saw this shop in the lobby. Can I go look?” “Go ahead. I’ll meet you in the lobby.”

We watched her dash out. Casey has never walked. Except once, when she was maid of honor at her father’s wedding to Linda. She went down the aisle so slowly that the minister had to go out and fetch her. Or so I hear. I wasn’t invited.

“She’s going to be a beauty,” Max said. “I’m surprised you had her come, Maggie, with all this shit going on.”

“She came all by herself. Had some problems with Linda, it seems, so she put herself on a plane last night. And here she is.”

He was smiling wickedly. “How sweet it is. Finally, you will learn what I went through when you were her age.”

Because of his wicked smile, I let him sign for breakfast with-out putting up even a token argument.

“How long are you staying in town?” I asked as we walked out to find Casey.

“I planned to fly up to the Bay Area today, but I need to deal with the insurance company. I’ll be home for Christmas.”

I took his arm and leaned against him as we walked into the lobby. “Max, I am so sorry about your car. I shouldn’t have left it at the academy overnight.”

“None of it was your fault, Maggot. Don’t give it another thought. Anyway, it was better the bomb went off at the academy than in the middle of town. Have you seen the crater it made?”

We met Casey coming out of a gift shop carrying a paper bag. She was finally smiling again.

“All set?” I asked her.

“In a minute.” She walked up to Max, grinning, and handed him the bag. “I know how much you liked your car, Uncle Max. So I want to replace it.”

It was a very small bag. Max hesitated, a bit nonplussed, but very flattered by this attention, whatever its payoff. Slowly, he opened the bag. Then he erupted in laughter and hugged Casey again.

“Thanks, you little creep,” he said. He pulled out a two-inch-long cast metal replica of a black BMW, just like his late car.

“Low maintenance,” I said. “Quite an improvement.”

“Quite.” He held Casey close to him as he walked us out. “To hell with the insurance people. If it’s okay with you two, maybe I can get all of us on a flight together tonight. What do you think?”

I think it’s a great idea. We’ll be at Emily’s. Call us.”

We said our good-byes on the sidewalk and he waited for us to catch the Dash. He waved to us as the bus pulled into traffic.

“Giving him that little car was a sweet thing to do, Casey.”

“I saw it when we were walking in,” she said. “Poor Uncle Max. Things always happen to him.”

“Poor Max,” I chuckled. I should have his problems. “So, we have a whole day in L.A. What do you want to do?”

“Nothing.”

“Good idea.”

I had seen a large stationer at the bottom of Broadway. We got off near there and bought a dozen large, collapsed cartons with lids. As long as we were doing nothing, I thought, we might as well begin packing Emily’s personal things. After the break-in, I was nervous about leaving her apartment unattended over the holidays.

The cartons were awkward to carry. Between us, we were managing all right until Caesar came up behind me and startled me. I spilled the lids.

“Hey, pretty lady,” he said. The sweats I had given him last night were caked with filth and torn on one knee. He reeked of wine and alley hovel. “You got you a pretty young friend.”

“Caesar, this is my daughter, Casey.”

“How you doin’ little lady?” He tipped his grubby cap.

“I’m okay,” she said, moving closer to me.

“I seen the man with the skinny nose,” he told her, his step faltering. “Skinny as your own nose.”

Casey seemed nervous about Caesar. I would have put my arm around her, but my hands were full. I just smiled and said, “He also saw the woman who walked the walk.”

“Yes ma’am I did. I ain’t got me no watch, but I say it wasn’ so long ago.”

“Mom,” Casey breathed. “You know him?”

“Friend of Aunt Emily’s”

“Oh,” she said flatly, understanding all too well.

I set down the rest of the cartons and fished a five out of my pocket. “Merry Christmas, Caesar.”

The bill disappeared into the folds of his coat. “Merry Christmas to you, pretty ladies.” He quick-stepped down the block. “What was he talking about?”

“It’s a long story. I’ll tell you later.”

We re-balanced the boxes and made it back to Emily’s without further adventure. I stopped at Mrs. Lim’s apartment and knocked on the door. I could hear her talking to us in rapid Chinese as she hustled to answer. A few days earlier, I would have thought she was scolding and been put off. But she wasn’t, so I wasn’t. She had grown on me.

Mrs. Lim opened her eyes wide when she saw Casey. “Mrs. Lim, my daughter, Casey.”

There was a lot of bowing. Casey bowed back and laughed a little, shyly.

“We’re going to start packing Emily’s things. I may go home tonight. In January, I’ll come back and finish. You should start looking for a new tenant.”

She shook her head and waved her arms, giving a strong negative to the suggestion. “No rent,” she said. “No rent.”

“Mrs. Lim, Emily won’t be coming back here to live. She’s up north with our parents. So you might as well find someone else to live there. It’s a nice apartment.”

“No rent,” she said again, and tears ran down her lined face. “Emily has long lease. All paid.”

“Suit yourself, then,” I said. Casey and I picked up the boxes again. “It’s your building. But you know what Emily would say about leaving the apartment vacant when someone might need it. Even if the rent is paid, I think it would be all right to find a new tenant.”

She seemed to cave in upon herself. “Not now,” she said firmly, and shut the door on us.

Casey and I walked upstairs, hassling the boxes and the slippery lids. Everything seemed normal and quiet around Emily’s door. I unlocked both bolts and we went in.

“Let’s put the boxes in the study,” I said. “Anything of importance is there. There are a few things in the closet that we should pack for Grandma. Later, I think I’ll call one of Aunt Emily’s friends, Sister Agnes Peter, to come for the clothes. She’ll know what to do with them.”

Casey chose to work in the study because she could move in the TV to watch. She was busily sorting through Emily’s books when I went into the closet.

It was difficult for me to handle Emily’s material remains because of the finality of it. It was acknowledgment that Emily no longer needed anything, was not coming back, ever.

As I went through the drawers, I tried to think as she would, trying to be more practical than sentimental. Emily would not approve of storing away good, warm clothes that could be used. She would not mind if they became soiled and torn like Caesar’s new sweats. A few really nice things gave me pause, but I let Em persuade me to leave them for Agnes Peter’s multitude.

Emily had a box with some nice jewelry, some of it gifts from our parents, perhaps some of it gifts from Jaime or lovers who followed him. Mother would have to decide what should be done with it. My job was simply to pack it.

The closet was quick work. Emily was not a saver. I had less than a boxful of things to carry home when I finished. I put the box in the hall, intending to take it into the study after I washed off some shoe polish I had gotten into.

As I passed the front door, I heard what sounded like metal scraping against metal outside. Old buildings make all sorts of noises all the time. I didn’t pay it any attention. Until I heard it a second time.

Casey was still in the study. She slammed a drawer shut and opened another.

I listened at the door for a moment; then, very quietly, I slipped the bolts.

At first, I saw nothing. Then I spotted a small figure huddled in the little alcove at the very end of the hall.

“Mrs. Lim?” I said, thinking maybe she was scrubbing the corners of the alcove floor.

The person there froze, and I knew it wasn’t Mrs. Lim. Slowly, back toward me, the figure began to rise.

“Celeste?” I said, puzzled. “What are you doing out here?”

She had a small screwdriver in her hand. On the floor beside her I saw a coffee can, a small length of copper wire, electrical tape, crimpers, a wind-up alarm clock, and a big Gucci handbag.

“Casey,” I called. “Come here please.”

“I’m busy.”

“Come here now.”

Casey must have heard something in my voice. She was out in a hurry. She looked at Celeste and put on her I’m-going-to-meet-another-one-of-Mother’s-strange-friends face.

“How long do we have, Celeste?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I think I’ve messed up the mechanism.”

I took Casey’s arm. “Go down and get Mrs. Lim and take her out of the building. There’s a phone across the street. Call nine-one-one and tell them there’s a bomb. They won’t believe you, so you argue with them until they decide to come. Got it?”

“A bomb?” Casey said, sarcastic.

“A bomb,” I said. “From across the street, have Mrs. Lim call anyone who might still be in the building and tell them to get out. Now.”

“This is a weird joke, right?”

“No joke.”

Casey looked at Celeste and decided to believe me. “Aren’t you coming?”

“I’ll be down,” I said, giving her a little push. “Now hurry.” As I said before, Casey never walks. And when she runs, she runs hard.

I squared off with Celeste. “Drop your tools and come down with me,” I said.

“It’s too late, Maggie.”

People facing death often say a lovely calm settles over them at the last moment. I hoped that impending death was not the reason I wasn’t incoherent with panic. More likely it was because Celeste was the most unlikely looking bomber imaginable. How many bombers wear silk and pearls to do their work?

“What were you planning to do,” I asked, “blow up the whole building?”

“No. Just you.” She held the screwdriver in her perfectly manicured hands. “And it wasn’t me. I mean, I didn’t make this thing. I saw you come in with your daughter. I didn’t want her to get hurt. I’m trying to disarm the damn thing, but I don’t know how.”

She was so mellow, so emotionally flat, that I knew she had to have taken something pretty heavy before she got here. “If you didn’t make the bomb, who did?”

“The resident pro. Made the one that got Rod, too.” She touched the coffee can with her shiny pump, made me real nervous. “I have the old book they used to use,” she said. “But all the research was done in the Cal library, and it’s a good thing no one was graded on it, because they made some terrible mistakes.”

“Mistakes?” My stomach made another somersault. I was remembering the whummp that kicked me after Rod fired his gun.

Celeste frowned, disapproving. “They got the explosives charts all wrong. Political types are not usually very good in physics, you know. You saw what happened in Berkeley.”

“How do you know the same thing won’t happen right here?”

“I don’t. According to the book, it’s only supposed to make a smallish fire.” She smiled at me coyly and shrugged, a matron puzzled by a new recipe. “Of course, this is the same device Arty Dodds was putting together when he was atomized.”

“Using the same directions?”

“Fragments of the book were found in the rubble. We all laughed about it, remember?”

“Let’s go down,” I said, moving toward the stairs.

She picked up the big Gucci bag, opened it, and dropped in her screwdriver. I expected her to follow me. I was no more than eight feet from the top of the stairs.

“Maggie,” she said in her sweet, cultured voice.

I turned and saw the automatic in her hand, and the little red dot on its side that warned that the safety was off.

I tried to sound calm. “You don’t want to make my daughter motherless, do you? Let’s go.”

“Oh, Maggot, I’m so tired.” She was stoned. I don’t know whether the drugs she had taken were kicking in or were wearing off, but I thought she wouldn’t be upright much longer. The disconcerting thing was that the hand that held the gun was steady, and she was intact enough to keep the sight aimed at my sternum.

I moved slowly toward her. Her pupils were soulless holes that held a beam on my face with the same black stare the gun held at my chest.

“Let’s go outside, Celeste.”

“What’s the point?” she sighed. “We can die here, or we can die out there. She’ll never leave us alone.”

“Who?”

“Who do you think? Aleda.”

This was a bomb of another sort. “You lie,” I said.

Celeste nodded. “I have to. Rod, too. My life may rest on a tissue of lies. But it’s my life. Emily had no right to decide for all of us that it was time to stop telling lies.”

“What lies?”

“About everything,” she snapped. “We all knew a firebomb had been set in the Berkeley labs. We all knew there were people working inside the lab. Aleda said it would be just a lot of smoke. We all knew she was lying. For twenty-two years, a whole generation, we covered for each other, we covered for her. One lie, and another, and another. A tower of lies. And I can’t climb down.” She rolled her eyes and seemed to lose her balance a little.

I had my eye on the gun barrel. “We’ll talk about it outside.”

She shook her head. “She’ll hear. She always knows things. All that time, she blackmailed us. And you know what we all did?”

“Tell me,” I said.

“Nothing. We did nothing.”

I shook my head. “Emily would never go along.”

“She did. Aleda had Em by the balls, too.” She thought about that a moment and waved it off. “You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t.”

“Marc!”

“Marc was dead,” I said. I was edging backward toward the stairs.

“Baby Marc. Aleda had Marc’s baby. She was preggers when she took off. Or so she said. All those years, Emily had investigators looking for him. Couldn’t find him anywhere. You want to hear the weird part? Last week, someone claiming to be Marc found Emily.”

Something in the coffee can went click. I lunged, caught Celeste’s gun hand and forced it up and back until her grip released. She wasn’t very strong. The automatic fell to the floor and I kicked it away.

Like tugging a big rag doll, I pulled her down the stairs and out the front door.

“How’d you know what to do?” Mike asked as the fire trucks drove away.

“I watch TV,” I said. I was crushed against his chest and enjoying it very much.

Celeste sat quietly in a black-and-white police unit parked ten feet away at the curb, her hands cuffed and resting in her lap, her trim legs properly crossed at the ankles. After the bomb squad had gone, Celeste was the only curiosity left for the assembled crowd to gawk at. As they grew bored-she hardly blinked for them-they drifted off.

Casey, who had been answering questions posed by a hand-some young sprig of the law, walked over and shook my arm. “Were you scared, Mom?” Casey asked.

“I was a little nervous about what Celeste had in that can, but she just didn’t seem to have enough wits about her to be dangerous. Besides, I’m bigger than she is.”

Mike laughed. He was hanging on very tightly.

Caesar came stumbling along with two pals, passing a bottle in a brown bag among them. When he saw me, he took a long pull from the bottle and ambled over sociably.

“Hey, pretty lady,” he said.

“Hey, yourself,” I said.

He aimed the neck of the bottle toward Celeste. “See you found your friend you was lookin’ for. Fine lookin’ lady, ain’t she?”

I looked at Celeste’s trim legs again. “The lady who walks the walk? That’s her?”

“Like I say,” he nodded and passed his bottle on to a thirsty friend.

I looked up at Mike. “If Caesar’s right, Celeste was at the wishing well by Hop Louie’s just about the time he last saw Emily.”

I could see his mind was already clicking.

“I’m going in with Celeste,” he said. “Just to make sure every-thing’s done right. I’ll call you when I’m finished with reports and we’ll argue some more about whether you should leave tonight or not.”

Even with Casey standing on the sidewalk behind me, making faces, I kissed Mike. “Write fast,” I said.

Grinning, he walked over to the black-and-white car, gave some instructions to the uniformed officers there, then climbed into the back seat beside Celeste. The car immediately pulled away and sped down Hill Street.

“Jeez, Mom,” Casey said, watching after the car. “First Dad, now you.

“I’m not getting married.”

“Well, you’re kissing him aren’t you? And probably other things, too.”

“How’d you get so wise? Or is that wiseass?”

I put my arm around her and we crossed the street back to Emily’s building. I don’t know whether Celeste had managed to somehow defuse the incendiary device that had been built into the coffee can, or whether it had been a dud to begin with. When it did its thing, there was a pop and a fizz and a spark big enough to char a hole through the old wool carpet runner under it. The bomb squad had come, caught up on gossip with the detachments of both police and firemen, and, eventually, carried away the remains of the can in a big lead box. For the kids waiting on the sidewalk, they had used lights and sirens when they drove away. As a source of pre-holiday excitement, the event had been as big a dud as the bomb.

Firemen had dragged the smoldering carpet out to the sidewalk and left it there for the trash haulers. A few lower floor tenants had snuck in behind the firemen to save a few precious pieces of furniture. The furniture now blocked the front steps and cluttered the hall inside. With the front door hanging open, an assortment of nosy neighborhood people had come inside for a better look at the burn mark on the floor upstairs. They still lingered about, finding the furniture more interesting than the damage.

“Think Ireland can be any more fun than this?” I asked Casey as we pushed aside a hand-carved, inlaid chest that stuck out into the landing.

“I hope so,” she said. “Poor Mrs. Lim.”

“I think she enjoyed the fuss.” We had left the door of Emily’s apartment standing open. “Shall we finish packing?” I said.

“I’m hungry, Mom. There’s nothing in the refrigerator to eat.”

“Let’s lock up and go out for a while. We’ll get something to eat, maybe see a movie. Something with more kissing than shooting, okay?”

“Gross,” she said. “I want my jacket. It’s cold.”

While Casey went to get her jacket from the chair in the sitting room where she had left it after breakfast, I waited in the little entry, trying to figure out how many boxes, and which ones, we would carry home on the plane.

“What do you want to eat?” I called. “Chinese, Mexican, burgers?”

Casey, white-faced, backed out of the sitting room and grabbed for me. “Mom.”

“What?” I went in to see what she had seen.

There was a man sitting on the sofa. He rose. At first, he was in front of the window, backlit by the glare so I couldn’t see his face. He wore jeans and loafers and a long wind-breaker. He was tall and straight. I knew I hadn’t seen him around the neighborhood.

“How did you get in?” I asked.

He shrugged. “The door was open. I hope it’s okay.”

He moved slowly toward me, away from the window. “I’m glad you’re okay,” he said. “I got real worried when all the police came. Until you came out, I didn’t know what to do. I’ve been waiting for the right time to talk to you. I was thinking I might be too late. Again.”

“Again?” I asked.

“Like Emily,” he said.

He seemed nervous, but more expectant than worried. He had a nice, deep voice that sounded so familiar I didn’t want him to stop talking. I had listened to his voice on Emily’s answering machine tape for hours a few nights earlier. Even with-out the tape, I would have heard a familiar quality in his voice.

I could not ever have passed him on the street without recognizing that I had known him all my life, though he was no more than twenty-two years old. My father had passed to my sister and brother and I a distinctive long, narrow nose with a hump at the bridge. Casey had my father’s skinny nose, too. Caesar had recognized it when he saw Casey. And when he saw this young man.

I reached out for the young man with the skinny nose.

He took a deep breath and touched my outstretched hand. “Maggot?”

“Hello, Marc. This is Casey.”