“They’re drawing him in, Tim. Lulu and the Barrio Dogtown gang. I’m watching it happen. I’m losing him.”
“Be firm, Daniela. Trust in God.”
“He needs more than God and me and the web of lies I’ve spun for him. He needs his church. He’ll need Azusa Catholic College next year. He needs to understand who he is and where he has come from. He needs you. Jesse is half you, Tim. Half yours. You are half responsible for creating him.”
“Oh, more, Dani. More than that. The credit, and the blame, are more than half mine.”
Daniela sees that she’s gliding along at ninety miles an hour now, steps off the gas, and feels the vehicle sag. Like her heart.
“Can’t you see how he needs you?” she asks. “It would be a new beginning of his life. To know you. Give him yourself, Tim. Become the man I loved and still love. He’s your only son.”
“Destroy my life’s work?” he asks, his powerful voice gentle now. “My parish and college? My nomination to bishop? My whole self?”
“It would damage your temporary body. Not your eternal soul. As you teach.”
She glances out at the hills and beyond to the mountains. Thinks of wildfires and the picture of Gomorrah in her childhood Bible companion, wonders if the Killer Cat is out there, wonders if Bennet Tarlow III had once loved his stepmother, then hated her for what she did to him. Both? Wonders how Jesse would feel about her, if she ever got Tim to accept her ancient request.
“I love you, Daniela,” he says, his voice still soft.
“And I love you, Tim. Even more than when I was seven and I thought you were God. I love the man you are. Please open your arms to Jesse.”
“My destruction.”
“Your son. Jesus has already forgiven you. And the world will forgive you someday.”
“My soul aches, as always,” says Tim.
“It aches for Jesse.”
“Yes. And selfishly, for what would be my destruction.”
“Rebirth.”
“Oh. Oh...”
In the rearview mirror Daniela sees the Highway Patrol SUV in her lane, coming up fast. Notes that she’s doing thirty-five now on the sixty-five-mile-an-hour toll road.
The lights come and the siren whoops and she pulls over.
“Dani? A siren?”
“I’m muting you. Don’t hang up.”
“I will never hang up on you.”
Daniela rolls to a stop and lowers her window. Beholds a highway patrolman from central casting: muscles in a tailored uniform, a brisk haircut, and Ray-Bans.
She hands the patrolman her badge and ID and he hands it back.
“Going a little fast back there, Deputy,” he says. “And awful slow up here.”
“I know.”
“Everything okay?”
“Just talking to my boss on the speaker.”
“Well then, drive carefully and have a good day.”
“You, too.”
Seconds later she’s back in the right lane, setting sixty-five on the cruise control.
The patrolman blows by in the fast lane.
“I’m back, Tim,” she says.
“Trouble?”
“Highway Patrol. It’s cool.”
“I have been thinking about what you’re asking since before he was born,” he says. “It is the central conflict of my life. It always has been. I will continue to think and pray. I will consult the Lord, as always.”
“I wish you loved us as much as you love God,” says Daniela. “And loved who you are to him. Let this cook.”
“Cook?”
“You know, let things play out. My partner Gale always says that.”
“Okay, Dani. I promise to let it cook.”
25
Gale climbs vertiginous switchbacks on his way up to the Tarlow family villa above Crystal Cove, built by Bennet Evans Tarlow between 1949 and 1953. The buildings are late Roman in style, created with travertine from the quarry that supplied Rome’s Colosseum and Michelangelo’s dome ribs of St. Peter’s Basilica.
The steepness of the road, and the way it seems to end in blue sky, stirs Gale’s unease with heights. Three hundred feet below him, waves crash out of sight.
He briefly takes his eyes off the road to glimpse the two mansions high above him, clinging to a massive promontory shaped somewhat like Gibraltar, overlooking the vast Pacific.
He’s never set foot on this property, but Gale knows that this compound is home to the patriarch Bennet Evans Tarlow and his wife, Jean — both in their nineties — and to their son Bennett Evans Tarlow II and his second wife, Camile, parents of the late Bennet Tarlow III.
A mansion for each Tarlow, into which Bennet would have moved upon the death of either couple.
To Gale’s left is a wall of white oleander, to his right a rock wall beyond which the Pacific Ocean twinkles and the waves roll onto the pale sand of Crystal Cove State Park. The mansions wait above and beyond, high, eastern windows reflecting the morning sun.
Gale remembers that this dramatic bluff and the Romanesque extravagance before him were the Tarlow family’s holdback for ceding Crystal Cove beach to the state. And that the Tarlow Company was given the state’s incalculable gift to develop the pristine hills overlooking the surrounding coast. The adjoining palatial homes, retail, business centers, and restaurants are here, now a part of Newport Beach.
The road levels off and Gale pulls up to a gated guardhouse, from which steps a broad Latino in a black suit.
Gale rolls down his window and badges him, notes the security camera on the guardhouse wall, aimed his way.
“Lew Gale to see the Tarlows.”
“Your partner is already here, Detective. Park beside her. You are meeting in the boss’s and Jean’s home — it will be on your right.”
He goes back into the guardhouse and the gate rolls open and Gale watches the camera track him.
An elegant Black man in a black suit introduces himself as Davis and leads Gale up the steps and into Bennet and Jean Tarlow’s limestone palace on the bluff. The marble foyer is large and filigreed with gold. Following Davis through a domed great room, Gale hears the sound of his heavy wingtips on stone. The room is bracingly cold.
An elevator lined in dark, stately oak brings them to the third floor, a spacious open-air piazza surrounded by chest-high limestone columns. Seagulls circle above in the blue, and between the columns Gale sees the ocean spangled and silver on this fall morning.
Five people are seated around a circular stone table in the center of the piazza.
Davis deposits Gale next to Daniela. Tarlow II and Camile stand briefly and sit without speaking or offering to shake hands.
Old Bennet and Jean sit back from the table, upright in motorized wheelchairs with steering columns and aggressive, off-road tires. The patriarch’s is blue, his wife’s is red. The couple is snug within tube jackets and both wear gloves and scarves. Their long gray hair lifts and shifts in the cold, incoming westerlies. They have smooth, pale skin. To Gale they look startlingly alike.
Daniela gives him an underfunded smile.
Gale, still standing, looks at each Tarlow in turn, then sits.
“I’m sorry for your—”
“We know that,” says Bennet II. “But this is not a social call. It’s an investigation into the murder of my son. Get to the point, if you have one in you.”
Gale looks at Camile, and Camile continues to look at Gale. Her face is big and strong-jawed, her eyes green, as is her pantsuit. Her platinum hair is cut short. She looks like a contemporary statue of the glamorous, big-haired society maven that he remembers from The Orange County Register society pages of his childhood.
From this, Gale tries to extrapolate how she looked when she seduced her stepson at age seventeen, three decades ago. She would have been thirty-nine. This hearsay, courtesy of solitary witness Norris Kennedy, and as yet corroborated by no one.