The Wedding Guest

Chapter 48

Even a high-end building needs somewhere to put garbage. The pink tower’s refuse-storage facility consisted of eight industrial dumpsters tucked into a caged square at the rear of the structure.

Directly below the south-facing units, but no reason to look down when up was so beautiful.

Thurston Nobach landed atop the left-most bin.

Postmortem photos didn’t reveal much in the way of humanity. More like a clotted stain, which Milo termed “Beyond apropos.”

Once Nobach’s parents were notified of his death, they reacted the way people used to getting their way do: mustering a battalion of lawyers to draft a demand letter, ordering immediate release of all information and material related to the cruel, callous, negligent police behavior leading to the death of an innocent young man in the privacy of his own home. Page two announced intention to file criminal charges against the perpetrators of said behavior, to be named. The final page tacked on a civil suit for damages related to...

Multiple copies were couriered simultaneously to the mayor, the D.A., several state and federal legislators, the local office of the FBI, and the city councilwoman and county supervisor whose districts encompassed the Wilshire Corridor.

That died quickly when the lawyers had a look at the contents of evidence obtained at Thirsty Nobach’s condo and a unit in the building he “managed.”

Radio silence. New goal: damage control.

Futile goal. Six hours after Nobach went over the glass, Maxine Driver called me at home. I was in the kitchen, ice pack pushed to my face, Robin and Blanche trying not to look upset.

“Sorry,” she said. “I got caught up in convention nonsense — serving on an inane committee but you know how it is. Anyway, the serendipity I mentioned was a historian from Emory on the same committee — maybe kismet, huh? Turns out his much younger wife was here as an R.A. and she interviewed to be an advisor for that program. She didn’t get it, Alex, but she knows who did—”

“Thurston Nobach.”

Silence. “You got there without me.”

“No big deal, Maxine.”

“We’re still pals?”

“You bet.”

“When the time’s right you’ll tell me the story?”

“Got a few minutes right now?”

With Maxine in the loop, everyone on campus knew by morning. By noon the following day, lurid details, some of them true, quite a bit not, spread to social media.

As Thurston Nobach became the fiend of the moment, the people who’d created him withdrew from public life.

No attempt to achieve accuracy. That’s the way it is, nowadays: facts, lies, the stuff in between.