It struck me that the entire Greek tragedy — all its significant locales, spread out over twenty-plus years — fell within a five-mile radius. The poles were Edwina Triplett’s apartment and Walter Rennert’s house, lying at opposite corners of the city, a distance befitting the class disparity. The other places that mattered were bunched closer together. From where I stood, Donna Zhao’s apartment was a fifteen-minute walk south. The spot where Nicholas Linstad had died was even closer — virtually across the street, up the hill on Le Conte.
Considering the circumstances of his departure from the university, I found it peculiar that he’d chosen to set up shop so close by.
I headed there to have a look.
Most of the block consisted of multi-unit dwellings catering to students. Halloween had recently come and gone, and the insides of some windows were still lined with paper jack-o’-lanterns and nylon cobwebs.
Twenty-four Halloweens since Donna Zhao died. The party never ended.
Nicholas Linstad’s former residence, a skinny brown duplex, was set back from the sidewalk, cowed by a larger building of more recent provenance.
I knocked first at the downstairs unit, where he had worked. Receiving no answer, I went down the driveway to the exterior staircase, climbed up slowly. Sure enough, I spotted a series of waist-high grooves in the shingling, scrubbed down by a decade of weather but visible nonetheless. I remembered the pathologist’s note that one of Linstad’s nails had torn partway off in the fall. He really didn’t want to die.
I reached the landing. The wobbly banister in Ming’s report had since been repaired, a large nailhead driven into the base of the post.
My knock again met silence. I stuffed my hands in my jacket pockets and turned, scanning for sight lines. Steep, wavy terrain put the surrounding homes at relatively different heights. None had a perfectly unobstructed view of the landing. I saw, mostly, power lines and trees. Nearest was a majestic redwood, wide and woolly, rooted in the rear yard of the adjacent multi-unit, on the other side of a rough picket fence.
“Can I help you?”
Below, a woman in a flowing turquoise dress and matching chunky necklace was walking a ten-speed up the driveway. Long white hair cascaded from beneath her helmet.
“Admiring the tree,” I said, clomping down the stairs. “Are you the upstairs tenant?”
“May I ask why you’re interested?”
I showed her my badge. “I’d like to take a look around inside, if you don’t mind.”
“I’m afraid I do,” she said. “I object to all manifestations of the fascist state.”
“It’s for an old case,” I said.
She smiled pleasantly and flipped me off. “Go fuck yourself.”
Chapter 22
Julian Triplett’s sister now went by the name of Kara Drummond. I phoned her at her place of employment, the Macdonald Avenue branch of Wells Fargo in Richmond, where she was an assistant manager. She agreed to speak to me during her lunch break.
With time to kill, I hung around in the parking lot, seeing ghosts. It was a neighborhood with a high body count. The year before I’d worked a shooting outside Target, two people dead, spillover of an argument that began with a dinged car door. More recently, I’d read that the city had begun paying high-risk kids a stipend for not getting arrested, a policy that kicked up controversy, folks arguing over whether it represented a new standard for creativity or a new low for desperation.
Noon thirty, a woman I knew from her DMV photo emerged, blinking against the cold bright sun. We headed into Starbucks. She declined my offer of a drink and we took a booth.
Kara Drummond was eight years younger than her brother, pretty, with good skin and quick, wide eyes. Heavy bone structure lurked beneath her surface; she’d put work into staying trim. She wore gray slacks, a white crepe blouse, black heels. No ring, leading me to wonder if she’d changed her surname in order to escape its notoriety. Could be divorced; a different father. She spoke with a polish that belied her age and origins. A pair of earrings, tiny dangling sunflowers, swung as she shook her head at me.
She said, “I don’t have contact with either of them. Edwina’s toxic. God knows where he is.”
I asked when she’d seen Julian last.
“A long time ago. After he got out,” she said. “I went over there to get him away from her. I didn’t want him picking up her habits. I told him he could move in with me but he wouldn’t budge.” She made a disgusted face. “I was about ready to slap him. All that time he was inside, she never went once to see him. She wouldn’t even pay for my bus tickets. You believe that? How cheap can you get?”
“Where’d they keep him?”
“Atascadero,” she said. Unconsciously she reached across the table and picked up my napkin, began twisting it. “It took me all day to get down there. They never wanted to let me in, cause I didn’t have ID. I was too young. I had to argue my way in.”
Her devotion impressed me. The youth camp was in San Luis Obispo, over two hundred miles to the south. “You went by yourself?”
“Who else’s going to take me?”
“Reverend Willamette?”
“I don’t do church,” she said. “Only thing I believe in is me.”
I decided I’d misread her reasons for changing her name.
She said, “Have you ever seen a juvenile facility?”
I nodded. I had. Far more often than I’d ever wanted to.
“Those kids,” she said. “They’re not kids. They look like kids, but that’s not what they are. They ate my brother alive. First time I show up, I haven’t seen him in two years. He’s got cuts all over his face. I’m twelve and he’s crying to me like I’m the big sister instead of the other way around. ‘You gotta help me, I can’t take it no more.’ I told him, ‘Julian, you fight back. They come for you, you hit them first. Hit them as hard you can.’ He couldn’t do it. The next time I come he’s got his arm in a cast.” The napkin was by now reduced to pieces. “They broke his arm with a fencepost.”
She paused to compose herself. “Once he got out, the last thing he needs is to end up back inside on account of Edwina doing something stupid. She’s not the kind of person who can handle her own business, let alone someone else’s. Let alone someone like him.”
Despite her efforts to the contrary, she was starting to get worked up again. “I’m the one petitioning to seal his records,” she said. “I’m the one filling out job applications. I’m not trying to sound selfish, but it’s not like I don’t have my own life.”
“It’s not selfish,” I said.
“How’m I supposed to manage it when she’s whispering in his ear the whole time?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know. I couldn’t.”
She sat back, drained but restless, her hands active, searching for something new to destroy.
“Did Julian use?” I asked.
“I never saw him do it. But I don’t know what he learned inside.”
“I’m asking cause I understand he suffers from mental health issues, and it’s common to have substance abuse problems on top of that.”
“As long as he gets his meds, he’s fine. That’s another reason I couldn’t have him living with her. She’d forget to give him his pills and next thing I know he’s calling me up, talking crazy. I have to drop what I’m doing and run over there.”