The Fallen

30

A week later I gave closed-session testimony to the San Diego Grand Jury. They had assembled at my request. I told them what Garrett Asplundh had discovered in his work as an Ethics Authority investigator, and I documented it with his reports, his sex videos, and my own discoveries. Talk about a hush falling over a room. I was thanked and told that I might be asked to testify again to the grand jury and perhaps subsequently in a court of law. Two days after that, I was back in the grand jury room again, this time with McKenzie and Captain Villas, going over the evidence in more detail.

I met with Carrie Ann Martier for lunch one day down in Seaport Village. We sat outside in the spring sun and watched the tourists go by. I told her that trouble was brewing and she would be a part of it. I told her that if she wanted to leave town and save herself from the theater of a trial, I wouldn’t stop her.

“You’ve got my bare ass on DVD with all those clowns,” said Carrie. “That’s my testimony, and thanks for the tip-off. I missed two days of work for the pinch up at Eden Heights, so I figure I’ve done my duty.”

“Got enough for a down payment on the Hawaii place?” I asked.

“I’m about eleven thousand shy,” she said. “Want to loan it to me? I can work it off. First night’s free because you’re a good guy. You’d be one happy man till I paid you off.”

“You think like a whore,” I said.

She smiled, a little coolly.

In mid-April the indictments started coming down — Anthony Rood and Steve Stiles, Fellowes and Mincher, and of course Jordan Sheehan. The headlines in the U-T were three inches high. There were more news crews downtown than there were for the Super Bowl back in ’03.

It was interesting to see not only who fell but who escaped.

By the end of that month, Jance Purdew issued a “stable” rating for San Diego municipal bonds. In spite of the turmoil brewing in our fine city, Trey Vinson had come through with a one-word rating that would save us scores of millions of dollars in interest payments over the years. I wondered if he had rated us “stable” in spite of being caught on video with a Squeaky Clean or because of it. The news media editorialized about the importance of “cleaning house” and how such painful diligence had already given San Diego a fresh new face on Wall Street.

Abel Sarvonola and the Budget Oversight Committee had glowing things to say about the new rating and San Diego’s future. The mayor unveiled a budget that would include funds for a new library and eighteen new patrol cars for us, without raiding the pension fund. That same week the Padres did a big trade with New York, which brought us two badly needed medium-length relief pitchers and stole the headlines from Sarvonola and the mayor, which is exactly what everybody wanted. Our city loves sports.

On behalf of Garrett, I went down to the National City apartment one evening and checked in on April Holly.

April had gotten a shorter haircut since I’d seen her at the funeral. Her wavy dark hair framed her face smartly and she looked even more like Stella Asplundh than before. She said SeaWorld was treating her just fine. She liked the people she worked with and had changed her major to biology in order to become a dolphin or killer-whale trainer someday. She told me that the first time she’d seen the Shamu show at night, she had realized what she wanted to do with her life.

Later I went to Miranda’s show at the Zulu Grill in Ocean Beach. It wasn’t a formal show. She had hung her twenty paintings around the restaurant that morning, and I sat with her at the bar that night as the patrons came and went.

Her paintings looked solid and humorful. She had taken the time to get the lighting on them right. Each work was a bright jewel that occupied its small space with surprising depth and authority. The longer I looked at them, the more comedy I saw taking place between the muscled men and curvy women on Miranda’s audaciously colored beaches. In one a surfer knelt in front of a seductively posed young woman. The woman was working her hands through her flowing yellow hair, ignoring him, and the surfer was scratching his head as he looked out at the waves. To me it was an illustration of the perfect disconnection between people who are together in a nice time and space.

“I like that one,” I said.

“Me, too,” said Miranda. “They’re both so lost and right for each other, but they don’t know it.”

Miranda sat beside me at the bar with a small stack of business cards she’d made up on a computer, but she couldn’t screw up the courage to introduce herself to the diners and drinkers, as the manager had suggested. She drank three quick mai tais and smiled at me goofily. A few minutes later she took a deep breath, slid off her barstool, cards in hand, and introduced herself to two couples sitting at a booth in the corner.

By ten she’d made the rounds of the entire restaurant and the bar. While she was talking to four loud guys sitting near the exit, I called over the bartender, paid the tab, and told him not to let her leave the restaurant drunk. I made sure he saw my shield. I was reminded of my first date with Gina and Rachel and the fact that I had refused to let them buy alcohol because of their ages.

Oddly enough, two nights later Rachel herself was sitting on my front-porch bench when I got home from picking up fast food. She stood as I came up the walkway. She was dressed beautifully and was noticeably perfumed. On the small wooden table in front of the bench were two glasses of red wine and an open bottle.

We sat on the bench. The wine was exceptionally good and Rachel let me know that it had cost eighty dollars. She also let me know that she had talked to Gina and that Gina was doing well. Gina had told Rachel about our good-bye. Rachel felt terrible for me, but she knew that “the seeds of pain can grow into wonderful things.”

We shared the fast food and Rachel laid her head on my shoulder for while. Then she pecked me on the cheek and stood. “Call me if you want, Robbie.”

“I’ll do that.”

“Good. Just so you know, I asked Gina. She said I was free to do this. She wants both of us to be happy.”

Another piece of my heart chipped away. “That’s nice.”

“Life is long, Robbie.”

“Mostly.”

Stella moved back to Northern California early that summer. We talked a few times before she left. She gave me Garrett’s fishing gear, which included a split-cane fly rod that Garrett’s father had given him.

Her eye healed up nicely but I can’t vouch for the rest of her. Every word she said and every movement she made seemed to come from huge effort. It was like she was saying and doing things for the first time. You can’t get back what was taken away from Stella Asplundh. You can’t replace. You can only move on and make a life again. You can look back but not too long, and forward but not too far.

McKenzie talked to Stella much more than I did before Stella left San Diego. In McKenzie’s opinion Stella would be okay. Stella had strength, empathy, generosity, anger, and a deep well of loss and sadness.

“It’s more than a lot of people have inside,” said McKenzie.

After drinks at the Grant one evening, Erik Kaven offered me John Van Flyke’s old job as head of Ethics Authority Enforcement. Kaven said I’d have plenty of latitude to sniff out corruption and four investigators to help me go after it. I turned it down because I already had the job I’d always wanted to have. And who knew — maybe someday I’d be able to shoo off a mean dog and drag some little boy out of the bushes and give him a ride home in my car.

One night I got out the tape that Gina had made me, of my fall from the hotel. I set it on the VCR in the living room while I tried to straighten up the place a little, glancing at it as I came and went.

Late that night, after cleaning the house and going to McGinty’s for dinner and a glass of wine, I slipped the tape into the machine and hit play.

It was brief but very dramatic. The cameraman had shot the video from across the street, probably not far from where I’d been eating my lunch. But thanks to a powerful zoom lens, the old Las Palmas took up most of the screen. Flames lapped from the open windows while the smoke billowed into the sky.

I knew which window to watch. I could see Vic Malic crouched there, screaming down at the people on the street. His voice had something helpless in it, which is what fooled me into thinking I was going to help him rather than be attacked by him.

For a minute Vic vanished from the window and I knew that he had stood and come at me.

I pictured his drunk and insane face, smelled the gin fumes pouring from his mouth, felt the power of his wrestler’s grip on my body, saw the gasoline can in one corner, saw the small hotel room spinning around me once... twice...

And then I watched myself fly out. I had been dressed in chinos and a white shirt and a light-colored jacket that day, so I showed up well against the darker brick of the Las Palmas. I saw my early struggle for purchase in thin air, the craning of my neck, and my hands clawing at the sky. I saw that odd moment of stillness, followed by a woeful acceleration down. My arms and legs pumped furiously as the bricks sped up behind me. I looked like a many-legged insect. I folded open onto my back, leveling and looking up at the window from which I’d been thrown, and I saw on video what I’d seen in life: Vic Malic staring down at me with a surprised look on his face.

I recognized the point — it was between the third and second stories of the building — that I realized there was nothing I could do to slow or stop my fall, and I looked up into the sky and let go. I saw my body relax and I saw my back arch gracefully, though I don’t remember relaxation or grace when it was happening.

Right after that I must have blacked out.

I watched myself slam into the awning and chute through the bottom of it feetfirst and greatly slowed, like a mummy sliding from a conveyor belt, for the last ten feet of my journey. Even with my fall broken so effectively, I still hit the sidewalk with a tremendous whack that I don’t remember.

The crowd closed over me and a moment later Vic Malic spilled from the front door and joined them.

I rewound and watched the tape one more time. I’m not sure what I was expecting to discover.

I didn’t want to see my moment of surrender because I had come to be ashamed of it in light of being made a hero. But I could see exactly where I was in the sky when I realized the drastic truth of my predicament and let go. Religious people might tell me I found God. Nonreligious ones might say I found a “higher power.” Atheists might tell me I had just awakened to the great, pure aloneness we all share.

After watching the tape twice, I could see my fall in all of those ways. With time to reflect, things take on meaning. But at that moment I wasn’t thinking of meanings at all. I was just a hopeless man hoping for the best. A man so scared his brain finally shut down.

When I saw what he had gone through I wasn’t ashamed of him anymore.

McKenzie married Hollis Harris that June in Jackson, Wyoming. Harris flew in over two hundred friends and family members, put us all up in five of the very nicest hotels in that pretty little city.

McKenzie was indescribably beautiful in her lacy white dress, with her black hair back in an elegant swirl that somehow disappeared within itself. She had her makeup done by a professional and the results were extraordinarily impressive. I’d never known she had such stunning eyes.

Neither McKenzie nor Hollis came from wealthy families — in fact, they were both lower middle class — so there was a very pleasing eccentricity among the attendees. Everyone seemed giddily happy to be there. I saw some very odd and very old clothes. One of McKenzie’s older brothers had a prison tattoo on the back of his thick neck. Hollis’s best man had been his best friend since they met in kindergarten. He was an extremely thin, bespectacled stutterer who had a heck of a time with his toast and whose rented tuxedo pants suddenly slipped to his ankles while he was dancing with McKenzie. The crowd roared and a massive and intense red blush covered his face, but he was smiling.

McKenzie had told me some months earlier that Hollis’s parents had died in a car crash when he was ten, and while I watched him dance with his bride with the splendor of the Grand Tetons as a backdrop I wondered at the great loss that had helped propel him to great achievement. His son was smart and talkative and had just turned six. We had a nice discussion about Bionicles, a line of ingenious and popular toys, one of which he carried around with him during the long, loud reception. When it was my turn to dance with McKenzie I told her she looked very nice without a gun.

The only downside of the wedding was that I had been forced to confess Gina’s departure. I tried to put “positive spin” on it by saying that we’d both left the door open in case we wanted to go back. I fooled no one. People began looking at me a little differently, though since my fall from the Las Palmas people had always looked at me differently, so I was used to it.

I had no one to impress.

I knew it was time to start over again.

I flew home the next day, a Sunday, and that evening drove to the Belly Up in Solana Beach to hear Lillian, the synesthete, sing.

The house was nearly full, which is saying something, because the Belly Up brings in some very good, big-name entertainment. I was obviously not aware of Lillian Smith’s substantial local reputation. I got a seat up close, probably because I was alone.

When Lillian walked onstage I found myself clapping and cheering along with everyone else. She looked larger onstage than off, with the gleaming white guitar strapped over her shoulder, the shiny high black boots, and the same long wine-colored velvet coat she’d worn to the Synesthesia Society meeting back in March. The stage lights crisscrossed over her and bounced colors off her glossy black hair. She squinted out at the audience as she prepared for her first song and I think she recognized me, though the nice smile could have been for anyone in the room, really.

She had a wonderfully expressive voice. It was high and pure but had a little roughness on its way up and down the notes. The colored geometrical shapes that poured out around her microphone were brilliant and profuse as tropical flowers. The more she sang the more they filled the air around her. Back in the old days, I might have reached out to move the shapes aside but they don’t annoy or fascinate me like they used to. Now they’re just part of what is. I’m learning to ignore them if I want to.

I sat and listened and let my mind wander, which is what it does when I hear music, or sermons in church. In the middle of her second song I became aware that she was looking at me. After that I had the odd feeling that she was singing only to me, much as I had paid attention only to her when I spoke at the San Diego Synesthesia Society meeting. It was a pleasant feeling.

Lillian’s songs ranged widely in topic, from a young girl’s relationship with her aging mother to a young woman who gets her heart broken but won’t admit it to a song called “Carefree Blonde,” in which the singer names her rivals after hair dyes, such as “Platinum Bounce,” “Cornsilk,” and “Urban Angel.” This song was funny and sarcastic, and many people sang along with the chorus.

While her songs filled the room with emotions and the shapes and colors flowed forth from her mouth, I tried to say good-bye to Gina once and for all. But you can only say good-bye to something that big a little at a time. So I said another small good-bye and I knew again in my heart that it was time to start over. I wasn’t the man for her. I thought I could change, but I never knew what to change into. I had done all I could do: I had fallen.

After the show I took a walk through the parking lot, then the nearest side streets. I located Lillian’s battered brown coupe parked under a streetlamp. I could hear the distant roar of the waves on the beach and see the downy threads of June fog riding by on the breeze. I decided against waiting for her and walked down by the beach for a while, but when I came back the car was still there.

I crossed my arms and leaned against it.

She came through the fog in her wine-colored coat, her guitar case in one hand. Behind her one of the large bouncers rolled a dolly with her monitors and another guitar case and a blue plastic milk crate filled with cords and plugs.

“Hello, Robbie,” she said.

“Hello, Lillian.”

“Want him to get lost?” asked the bouncer.

“He’s okay,” said Lillian.

“Pop the trunk, Lil,” he said.

She unlocked the car, bent inside, then stood up straight again. With the boots on she was almost as tall as I was. In her stage makeup she looked older than she had before, and the age looked good on her.

“How have you been?” she asked.

“Really good. You?”

“Good, too. Still seeing voices?”

I nodded. “I really don’t mind. You kind of get used to it. Still hearing faces?”

She studied me a moment. “Yeah. I read about you and the grand jury,” she said.

“It had to happen.”

“Where’s your wife?”

“Las Vegas. It was over when I met you. I just didn’t believe it then.”

She eyed me with frank distrust.

The trunk slammed and the car rocked. The bouncer came over, hugged Lillian, and glared at me. Then he turned and aimed the empty dolly back toward the nightclub.

“Take a walk?” she asked.

“That would be great,” I said.

“Talk to me, Detective Brownlaw,” she said.

“About what?”

“Anything you want.”