‘All right.’ Jeff attempted a smile. But he could see that, for all the banter, the panic in his former partner’s eyes had not gone. For the first time since he had known her, he knew Barbara Miller was hiding something.
She was driving south on the 5 when she realized she didn’t know what day it was. She had been in such a blur since that phone call, she had lost track of time. For most insomniacs that sensation, at least, was not so unusual. When you have no nights, it can be hard to keep a grip on the days.
But in LA, as she had learned through direct experience, it could be costly. Get caught driving on, say, a Thursday in a No Thursday vehicle and you’d get more than a lecture about smog and pollution from the Highway Patrol. They could revoke your licence on the spot. You had the right to appeal, but while you did you were off the road. Appealing was all but pointless anyway. There was no case you could make, short of a life-and-death medical emergency – and even then the court would ask why you didn’t get a taxi or hitch a ride. Keeping the smog out of southern California was a state priority. Everyone mocked it, but the slogan that launched the scheme was now engraved into the Californian collective memory. School kids could sing the jingle even now: Everyone can drive sometime when no one drives always.
She had to work her way back to getting kicked out of the sweatshop, reconstructing the sequence event by dreadful event, before she realized with relief that today was still Monday. It was late afternoon and, as it happened, smoggy. The driving restrictions had succeeded in making people mad but not, it seemed, much else. For days on end, the city would still be wreathed in thick white cloud. At dawn, it could look like a morning mist. Except it would refuse to disperse or burn off as the sun came up. Instead it would linger, squatting there in the bowl of the city, refusing to budge, sometimes so dense you could stand on one side of the road unable to see what was on the other. Some blamed the slashing of the old clean air standards, shredded years ago in the name of maintaining America’s competitiveness. The US authorities said the responsibility lay with ‘Asia’, insisting that the smog came in on springtime winds from the east. On the street, less fastidiously, people blamed China.
It didn’t smell, but it played havoc on your lungs. These days even Maddy had a smog mask, though she kept it tucked away in the glove compartment.
The phone rang, its sound quickly transferred to the speakers. She glanced down to check the caller ID, but the phone was in her bag. She took a second, weighing the chance of dodging a call from a sympathetic friend against the risk of missing Jeff or one of his police colleagues bringing new information, before deciding the latter was too great. She pressed the button.
‘Hi there, is that Madison?’ The voice young, chirpy. Valley.
‘Who’s calling?’ Maddy said, wary and driving slower now, peering through the oncoming smog, the headlights on even in the afternoon.
‘Hi, I’m from the Los Angeles Times? We haven’t met?’
‘Hi.’
‘I just want to say how sorry we all are about your loss? Everyone here sends condolences?’
‘OK.’
‘We’re just trying to put together something about Abigail for Metro …’
A surge of irritation passed through Maddy, the first cause being that ‘Abigail’. Don’t you dare speak about her as if you knew her, as if she were your friend.
‘… you know, just some details, maybe an anecdote about what she was like.’
It took a second or two for Maddy to process what she had just heard. Then she said, ‘Are you seriously trying to interview me about my sister? Is that why you’re calling?’
‘Well, it’s not … I wouldn’t call it an interview, just maybe something you’d like to …’ The reporter at the other end of the line suddenly sounded very young.
‘Who put you up to this?’
‘Put me up to … I’m sorry, I don’t understand?’
‘Who told you to call me?’
There was another pause and then: ‘The news editor. Howard? He thought it’d be OK to call you? I’m really sorry, is this a bad time?’
‘You’re damn right it’s a bad time. And you can tell Howard Burke that next time he wants to know about my family he can damn well have the balls to call me himself.’
‘I’m sorry, I just …’
Maddy could hear the nervousness in the woman’s voice. Suddenly she felt a jolt of familiarity. It used to be her on the end of that phone. She had done it a dozen or more times, especially when she first started out on the police beat. Calling the victim’s family, perhaps the most gruesome part of the job, harder even than seeing the body – and Howard had made her do it. After the first or second time, he hadn’t needed to ask. It became routine. She was more adept at it than this one; she knew not to sound perky, not to sound like a girl who had just spotted a bargain at the mall. She had a bereavement voice, which breathed sincerity. But now, sitting alone in her car, on a smog-bound, jammed freeway, she was not sure that put her on any kind of higher moral plane. In fact she knew it didn’t. She was just better at it.
She apologized to the woman and promised to text her a line or two later.
Forty minutes later and she was at the house – or as near to it as she could get. There was no room to park: both sides of the road were filled. She checked the note she made, to be sure she was in the right place. But there was no mistake.
There was a small crowd by the front door which, as she got nearer, she could see was an overspill from inside. She slowed down, making an instant assessment of the people there: poor, but dressed in their most formal clothes. It was the mud she spotted on two pairs of dark leather shoes that settled it. Rosario Padilla had died nearly three weeks ago. In homicide cases it often took that long to release the body from the morgue and return it to the family. These people must have just come from the funeral.
She nudged and excused-me’d her way in, working herself up the steps onto the porch and through the screen-door into the house. Once in, she heard the hush. Someone was making a speech. She stood behind a knot of middle-aged Latinas, all nodding as they listened. Before them, next to a mantelpiece covered in family photographs, was a man she guessed was her own age. Dark and in a suit that seemed too small for him, he was speaking with great intensity.
‘And her faith was important to her. My aunts will tell you, Rosario was the one who actually wanted to go to church.’ The women in front of Maddy turned to smile at one another at that. ‘I hope that faith is a comfort to her now. Because I’ll be honest with you, and I didn’t want to say this there, at the cemetery. But I’m finding it hard to believe right now.’ His voice choked, a show of weakness that made him shake his head. An older man placed his hand on his shoulder.
Maddy had seen plenty of moments like this: a father comforting the brother of the deceased, the extended family wiping away their own tears. It was familiar to her, yet it struck her with new force. Soon she would not be watching this scene, from the back. She would be there, at the front: she, Quincy and her mother, the mourners. Quincy would doubtless demand
