I thought about her self-berating carrying through her office door. No, it's not okay. I didn't double-schedule staff, and now he's gonna wind up in the hall because of me.
She seemed to read my mind. "Not that I'm any good at it. But I did figure out one thing."
"Which was?"
"You can't get through life, which is this shit this fragile enterprise without getting damaged. You just don't. Not if you're a feeling person. Not if you don't have your head buried in the sand. Everybody's fucked up. Some of us are just in on the joke. And when you don't want to see that in yourself, you see it in others."
She climbed into her car and started to back out, then rolled down her window. "That's what you don't understand in that pulp you churn out. Everyone's a good guy. Everyone's a bad guy. It just depends how hard you're willing to look."
Chapter 22
I knocked again on the hemlock-wood door, then peered through one of the frosted glass panes. Though I'd picked up Preston out front many times, I'd never actually been inside his condo, a balconied two-room floating among the billboards of Sunset. It occurred to me that I'd always had an image of it Milanese furniture, stone bathtub, faint whiff of sage hand soap.
The door opened face width. For an instant even from this close I mistook Preston for someone else. His hair, usually flared so carefully over his forehead, lay limp against his head, and he was unshaven, his stubble sprinkled with gray. I could see the lapels of a bathrobe he hadn't left all day?
Mortification flickered across his features.
I tried for a joke to put him at ease. "I didn't tell you I was picking you up for a black-tie at the Beattys'?"
His face was tense; for once he wasn't sure what to say. He cleared his throat, eased the door farther open. "I've been editing. No time to get my face on." He said it with a defensive edge, and it occurred to me that in the years I'd known him he'd never extended an invitation for me to drop by. He always seemed so comfortable marching into my house with his own key that I'd assumed the informality ran both ways.
"Bad time?" I asked. "I could "
"Well, you might as well come in now." He stepped back, and I followed him down a brief, dark hall into the main room. The furnishings were hardly threadbare, but I was shocked by their ordinariness. A standard couch. White-tile kitchen. An antique credenza with hairline cracks, a ding or two away from a garage sale.
Preston returned to the tiny table by the window, sat, and gestured to the other chair. The table, stacked with shuffled sections of the New York Times, wasn't really sized for more than one person. Preston set aside Arts and went back to the soggy bowl of cereal I assumed was his dinner. A bare leg poked out from the fold of his bathrobe.
The whole scene was so banal, so unfabulous, so decidedly unPreston. I'd never seen him unshaven. I'd never seen him not nattily attired. I'd never seen him eating food bought at a grocery store. It was a perfectly ordinary scene in a perfectly nice condo, but it was also somehow a breach in my view of him and how he kept himself, and this we both sensed. Nothing had happened nothing at all but the awkwardness was pervasive.
"So?" he asked. "What's so urgent it couldn't wait for me to barge in on you?" He didn't lift his gaze from the bowl; his heart wasn't in the joke.
I pressed forward. "You'll get a kick out of this. That kid Junior, right? So I found him at Hope House…"
But the surroundings continued to distract me. Sodden coffee filter on the counter. A lonesome glass in the sink, awaiting the dishwasher. Manuscript sheaves, bearing Preston's editor-red scrawl, had colonized most of the condo's flat surfaces. The thought of him in here alone, only these chunks of text keeping him company, seemed oddly dismal. Had I expected him to edit during cocktail parties?
Atop the crammed bookshelf by the TV, bookended between two heavy mugs, sat a row of my hardcovers. The closest thing to a display in sight. Preston always badgered me so much about my writing that I'd forgotten that maybe he liked it. The possibility that he valued me more than he let on oddly diminished my view of him. A trust-fund editor more articulate than I was, he'd taken a gamble on me five books ago, and I hadn't really updated my underlying view of him since. Though we'd become good friends, if not intimates, in my hidden thinking he'd always remained part of the unscalable edifice of New York publishing, and I felt a devotion to him for giving me that first hand up. I knew, of course, that I was an opportunity for him then and especially now. But perhaps I represented a more profound opportunity than I'd thought. Like the rest of us, Preston was busted in his own lovely way. But maybe he was also ordinary like the rest of us. Maybe he needed me as much as I needed him.
Preston had said something.
I refocused. "Sorry?"
"I said, 'Yes, you found Junior…?' "
I forged back into the story Xena and the cop and the jail cell but I couldn't convey the maddening hilarity of it. Preston humored me with a faint smile and the occasional nod, but we were both distracted and aware that the surface exchange had become a charade.
When I was finished, I said lamely, "You gotta meet this kid." I riffled the edges of the nearest newspaper section until the noise grated. The air felt unvented, claustrophobic. I was eager to get out of there, impatient to start looking into the vehicle ID Junior had given me. Finally I said, "I gotta get over to Lloyd's. Tell him about the Volvo. I just thought you'd get a kick out of the other stuff."
"Sorry to disappoint."
"You never disappoint, Preston."
He summoned a smile before rising to see me out. "No," he said. "Of course not."
Chapter 23
Lloyd sat at the kitchen table, head bent, arms folded on a place mat dotted with crumbs. I'd informed him of my tentative vehicle ID at the door, and he'd taken a few steps back and sunk into a chair.
"Unbelievable," he said. "You came up with a make, color, distinguishing body damage, and the first license-plate number?"
"Should I go to Kaden and Delveckio with it?"
"Let's think this over." He stood and poured himself a rum and Coke. I noticed that the bottle of Bacardi 8 I'd brought him two days ago was nearly empty. He was wearing sweatpants and a T-shirt, and the blanket on the couch was thrown back. In the background a talking head chattered mindlessly about avian flu, predicting calamity and ruin. "You don't know for sure that the Volvo belongs to the body dumper?"
"No. The witness split before he saw anything. It's possible that another car could've come along after, but we're talking a pretty narrow time frame here between when my witness left and when you snapped that first crime-scene photo."
"Either way it'd be worth talking to the Volvo driver. Either he's our guy, or he likely saw something." Lloyd sucked an ice cube from the glass, crunched it loudly. "How reliable is your witness?"
I tried to imagine Kaden and Delveckio taking Junior seriously.
Lloyd read my face. "Then we should load the deck. Let me run the info in the morning, see what I find. I can't check for a wheel-well dent, obviously, but with everything else? You've given me some great search criteria. If I come up with a strong suspect, you'll be better armed bringing it in to Kaden and Delveckio." He aimed a forefinger at me. "But no mention of me."
"I haven't implicated you in anything. And I won't."