Patsy had nothing to contribute from the front seat. For a long while—almost twenty minutes—they listened to the rain hammering against the truck. Finally Patsy said, “Maybe you should try again.”
He did, and once again the machine picked up. John said, “Alex said you threw him out because he was gay. I don’t buy it. I think he did something, something that hurt you. That’s why you still call him ‘your only son.’ That’s why you told the media ‘he left your life.’”
Fifteen minutes later, the phone rang. Patsy jumped, then spun in her seat. John answered without saying a word. The person on the other end of the line said, “Who is this?” The woman’s voice was soft but insistent, like a kindergarten teacher’s.
“My name is John Houck.” Silence from the other end. Patsy’s grimace told him she thought this was a bad move.
Charlotte Martin said, “Is my son with you?”
“No. He’s not.”
“Then how may I help you, Mr. Houck?”
“I need you to meet with me.”
“I’ve been led to believe that you’re a dangerous man,” she said quietly, and with what sounded like only mild offense, as if someone has asked her to dance to a fast song.
“Your son is being framed for murder, and if I don’t stop him, he’s going to kill the man who’s trying to frame him.”
“And who would that man be?”
“You can pick the place.”
“As I have said already, I’ve been led to believe that you are a dang—”
“What’s dangerous is that your son is out there with my Sig Sauer, which he knows how to fire, and a Ka-bar knife, and no one knows where the hell he’s gone. Now, you can look at this in one of two ways. You might have information that could help me find him before he does something profoundly stupid. Or if it’s really true that he left your life, maybe this is an opportunity to get him back.”
“This is very strange,” she whispered. “Very, very strange.” He felt like saying that her tone sounded strange. He couldn’t tell if it was sarcasm or genuine anger. Maybe being kept prisoner in her own home had kicked a dent in her composure. He hoped so, and went in for the kill. “There are two news vans across the street. The map says there’s a nature trail behind your house, but I can bet you there’s some reporters camped out there, too. If you need me to find you a way past them, I can.”
“Do you know where the Alhambra Hotel is?” she asked him. They had passed it on the way to her house, a seven-story pink adobe building with a lighted gold dome. He told her he did, and she said, “There’s a big lawn just downhill from it, right on the water. There’s a bench there. Sit there until someone comes for you.”
“Not someone. You.”
She had hung up on him.
15
The crescent-shaped lawn below the Alhambra Hotel was empty. Just as Charlotte had told him, there were several benches lining a curving path. Beyond a white clapboard fence, rocky outcroppings jutted out into the sea. The beach where Alex and Mike had taken their first dive into the ocean together had to be nearby, but he couldn’t see it through the fog. At one corner of the lawn was a darkened clubhouse with a bridge club schedule on a hand-painted sign out front. John took shelter against one corner of the structure, assessing the consequences of following Charlotte Martin’s order.
Because he was confident it was a test, he sat down on the bench for about a minute. Then he got up, walked back to the clubhouse, and scanned the darkened coastal drive on the other side of the broad lawn for approaching cars. Just above the street, the bottom of the Alhambra’s property line was marked by a white clapboard wall topped with lattice panels. Above that, the flat rooftops of what looked like villas were clustered around an open space John figured was the hotel’s swimming pool. When he was confident he had another opening, he went back to the bench, sat down on it, and stared stupidly out at the roiling ocean until he felt eyes on the back of his neck.
They were a foot apart when the approaching stranger tilted his umbrella back, revealing cueball eyes and a bushy brown mustache. “Your name is Mr. Smith,” he said, and it took John a second to realize it wasn’t a question. “My name is Franklin, and Mrs. Martin has asked me to tell you that as night manager of the Alhambra Hotel I have explored all the various definitions one can find for the word discretion. So if you could please—”
And then he recognized John, and the mirth left his expression. His lips parted, but nothing came out as he realized he was standing a foot away from a fugitive connected to a gruesome murder currently all over the news and all over his town. But Franklin said no more, and John fought the urge to ask the man if he had just come up with another definition of the word discretion.
“With me, please,” he said. John followed the umbrella across the lawn, then across the street and through a service entrance. Then they were moving through a narrow, rain-soaked alley, past a row of Dumpsters and then through an open door to what looked like the hotel’s brightly lit kitchen. “You might want to keep your head down,” Franklin said politely, even though John still had his hood on. Another doorway brought them to an interior staircase with a dark green carpet that had white blossoms printed all over it.
John smelled stale perfume mixed with cigarette smoke, then the smells of cooked meat coming from room-service trays that had been left outside the doors to rooms. Being rich meant you could discard odors the way normal people discard old socks.
On the seventh floor, Franklin held up a hand and stepped out into the hallway. Once he was confident the coast was clear, he waved John through, and John felt as if he were on his way to a sexual rendezvous with a married woman.
The walls and doors were mahogany with brass fixtures, and the Oriental carpet that ran the length of the halls was run through with dark blues and reds. Unlike the other floors he had glimpsed on the way up, this one seemed to have been preserved in the period of the hotel’s construction, and the doors were spaced far enough apart to let him know that they were suites. At the end of the hallway they came to a second staircase, with a dark wood railing and a red velvet rope blocking the bottom step. Franklin unhooked the rope, noticed John’s hesitation, and said, “The Soledad Room is closed this evening.”
He nodded, followed Franklin up the stairs. At the top step, they entered an expansive square room that seemed to take up the entire eighth floor. The walls were half plate-glass windows. Off to his left, he could see the cove and its bluff lined with mansions, their security lights fogged with shifting halos by the lingering mist. Two rows of tables, cleared of everything except their white tablecloths, ran down the center of the room. Booths lined the walls, their backs low so as not to block anyone’s view.
Charlotte Martin was sitting in a booth in the far corner, a view of the whitecap-strewn ocean visible behind her. Someone, probably Franklin, had lit several tea candles on the table in front of her. The only other illumination came from the massive lighted gold dome that covered the hotel’s roof; it bathed the borders of the room in a dull glow.
As he approached her table, Charlotte Martin rose to her feet slowly and extended her hand. Her hair was slightly mussed, as if she had just stepped out of her private plane. Her black turtleneck sweater gave her curves without giving them away. He figured she had had several face-lifts, but he couldn’t tell where any of them began or ended.
John took a seat, expected her to break the ice, but instead she looked out the window to her left. John followed her vision to where the street in front of her mansion was lit up by the bright lights of news cameras. The reporters camped out in front of her home were all about to go live for their eleven o’clock newscasts. From this height, he could see the mansion’s long, rectangular swimming pool, could see the floor-to-ceiling windows, covered by blackout curtains, that looked out onto it. How had she gotten out?
“What does soledad mean?” John asked.
“Loneliness,” she said quickly, as if she were pleasantly surprised that he
had asked the question. “Which is, I guess, what an intellectual might refer to as irony, given that this could be such a romantic room under different circumstances. Of course, there’s a nearby mountain with the same name, so it kind of kills the joke, don’t you think? Can I get you a drink?”
“I’d rather it just be the two of us.”
“There’s a bar right over there. I’d be more than happy to make you one myself.”
“No, thank you.”
“I see. You want to stay alert, is that it? You’re afraid I might try to gay-bash you with my right shoe?” Instead of answering, he took the time to register that she had bought into the implication on the news that he and Alex were a couple. He decided to let her believe this because of what it might reveal about her. When he didn’t respond, she returned her attention to the view of her house below. “They’re nice enough, I guess. Earlier I went to visit my mother-in-law in the hospital and they didn’t try to shock me the way they did the first time. See, I’m learning that’s what they do. They just shout the most insane question they can think of to get your attention. This morning one of them asked me if I thought my son practiced unsafe sex.” She laughed into her drink before downing a quick swallow of it.
“Your mother-in-law is sick?” he asked.
“Alex didn’t tell you?”
John was about to answer when he realized Alex had indeed told him that his grandmother was dying, just a few nights earlier as they sped past highway signs for this very place. “Are you in love with my son?” she asked him. When she saw how startled he was by this question, she set down her drink and crossed her arms in front of her. “I think it’s a fair question, given the lengths you’re going for him.”
His first instinct was to say he hadn’t known Alex long enough to be in love with him. This was the safe way out, the politician’s answer. But he needed Charlotte to stay polite for as long as possible, and it seemed to him she was more likely to do that if she thought she needed to prove to her son’s lover she wasn’t a homo hater. “Yes,” he heard himself answer. Once the word left his mouth, he felt a stab in his gut, as if just muttering this response would make it true. But then he saw that the reality around him had not shifted in the course of a single word—the tea candles still flickered, the mist still crawled over the shore below, and the smooth swell Charlotte Martin’s breasts made against her sweater threatened to draw his attention as much as her words.
“Well, then, you should know that he’s a very determined young man. And from the look of things, he’s not very interested in doing things your way.”
“He’s mad as hell and has been for a long time. I’m not sure if that’s the same thing as being determined.”
“And you blame me for that?” He decided to let her twist on this one, wanted to see if she was a woman prone to defending herself. She cleared her throat and sat forward. “I see. So it’s all my fault. Perhaps he would have preferred to have been born in my hometown. I’m sure he would have just adored Colton, where I would have been a career waitress, and a sensitive young man like him would been beaten to a pulp every day on the way to school.”
“So you married well.”
“People take expressions like that for granted, Mr. Houck. Married well. As if all I did was buy the right hat. There are so many years, choices, sacrifices, and disappointments that go along with marrying well. More than thirty years ago I was cleaning up after a drunk who told me that girls with legs as good as mine didn’t need to attend college. Tomorrow morning I will be hosting the Sisters of Light charity luncheon in the lower ballroom of this hotel, regardless of whether the news media decide to make an appearance. Over the past five years I’ve raised almost twenty million dollars for that organization. One of my board members told me just the other day that at the rate I’m going, leukemia might become an ancient memory in our lifetime.” She studied him for a few seconds. “I take it you’re not impressed.”
“It sounds like good work,” he said quietly.
She didn’t seem convinced by his tone. “So tell me, what is this story my son told you?”
“It’s short. You found out he was gay, and then you cut him off and threw him out.”
Her glare was so steady he had to fight the urge to shift in his seat. She uncrossed her arms and leaned back into the booth. She took a sip of her drink, then set the glass down gently, as if she were afraid it might break from the tension of her grip.
“My son had an affair with a married man. This man was not only one of my husband’s business partners, he also had two children and lived several blocks away from us. When his wife found out about the affair, she tried to kill herself. She wasn’t successful. When she came to, she hired a good lawyer and took her husband for almost everything he was worth, thus killing a thirty-million-dollar beach resort project my husband had been working on for five years.
“When I confronted Alex about all of this, he looked me dead in the eye and told me that he thought I would prefer that he sleep with a married man from Cathedral Beach rather than some fag he picked up in a bar. Those were his exact words, by the way, lest you should accuse me of homophobia.”
Along with confusion, John felt shame and embarrassment for Alex, because there was no denying that the story fit with so much of what he had already learned about him. What had Philip said? Would we be here if Alex could love someone like him? Before Mike, it had been a married man old enough to be Alex’s father.
“As for my son being cut off? It’s true we decided to withdraw our financial support of his education. We thought it only fair that if he was going to go around screwing up his father’s business deals by thinking with his groin, then he should be on his own for a while. Learn the real value of a dollar.” She stopped suddenly as if she didn’t like the taste of her own words. “Has he? Learned the value of a dollar, I mean.”
“He’s been too busy learning the value of a gun.”
“And who’s been teaching him that lesson, Mr. Houck?” John kept his mouth shut and gave her a weak smile that hurt his cheeks. “I see—so you have other vested interests here. If my son actually does decide to pull the trigger on—I’m sorry, just who is it that’s framing him for murder again?” She furrowed her brow deliberately, held her hands out as if she were waiting to hear the price of a lousy haircut.
“If you want to talk names, why don’t you give me the name of your husband’s former business partner?”
“You don’t honestly believe this man is harboring my son, do you? He left Cathedral Beach years ago. I wouldn’t be surprised if he’s dead drunk in a gutter somewhere.”
“You didn’t know about the affair until his wife found about it, so I’m not putting any stock in what you know.”
She flinched at the bite in his voice. “I’m sorry, Mr. Houck. Did I hurt your feelings? I just assumed, since you’re a man who’s been trained to kill with his bare hands, that you would find all these sordid matters of the heart to be superficial and petty. Amusing even.”
“Alex said you were a bitch. I was hoping he was wrong.”
“My son enjoys telling lies to get what he wants. And it sounds like his victim routine worked on you quite well.” She gestured to him with an open hand, took a drink with the other. Even though she didn’t know the truth of his relationship with her son, John felt the bite in her words.
“You flew into a rage at your son because he screwed up your access to millions of dollars you didn’t need. And you faking a lot of self-righteous moral indignation strikes me as funny, ’cause you’re the one who’s got a system worked out for meeting strange men at nice hotels late at night—a system so good it can get you past three news crews who would kill for a sound bite.”
Her strained laughter didn’t quite make it past her throat. She took a deep breath and said, “And you, Mr. Houck, are in love.” She drew out the last word as if she were mocking the concept of love itself. “That’s the only way I can see a man like you buying into this kind of
victim-driven nonsense.”
“Give me the name of—”
“Arthur Walken,” she snapped. “Developer, cheat, and lover of young boys. Last I heard he had relocated to Chicago.” Her words were rushed, breathless. He couldn’t tell if divulging Arthur Walken’s name angered her, or if she were still smarting from the implication that she had affairs of her own, an implication she had not responded to. “Can you really see a thin-skinned young man like my son hiding out in the Midwest? I can’t. He’s not cut out for snow. You know, regardless of how I feel about the choices my son has made in his life, I have nothing against homosexuals. Nothing, truly. But I’m not a fan of the oppressed, the victimized. When an entire group of people come together and try to make some kind of identity out of what they don’t have, they usually end up convincing themselves they can do whatever they damn well please.”
Suddenly John was no longer in the Soledad Room. He was back in his trailer, listening to these very same words come out of Ray Duncan’s mouth. He had heard the sentiment before, dozens of times, about blacks, Mexicans, even the Army, but Charlotte’s phrasing had been almost identical to Ray’s. Had he mentioned Duncan’s name yet? No. He hadn’t wanted to come off as a complete loony from the get-go by trying to convince her that a real cop was tied up in all this.
“Is that all you wanted?” she asked.
“Just about.”
“Well, if you do find him, there’s something else he should know, something you might be able to tell him that would convince him to stop all this nonsense.” John responded to her dramatic pause by raising one eyebrow. “He’s about to inherit fifteen million dollars.” She let this sink in as she took a sip of her drink.
“His grandmother is ill, as I told you, and Alex is named as the secondary beneficiary on her life insurance policy. Alex’s father was the primary of course, but given that he died first, all that money goes to Alex. And maybe to you as well—if things work out, of course.” She gave him a mock toast. “Congratulations, Mr. Houck. It looks like you’ve married quite well.”