“You have no situational awareness,” I said, “and that can get you killed.”
“You’re being irrational.”
“I’m being irrational? Who showed up unannounced at my apartment armed like Annie Oakley because they were so goddamn scared? You act like it was all a bad dream. Everything’s peachy once more in the fairy-tale land of Savannah Carlisle Echevarria.”
“Danny Katz is a dry cleaner. Let me repeat that: a dry cleaner. Not a murderer.”
“Did I or did I not instruct you to lock your doors?”
“You’re not my boss, Logan! We’re divorced, remember?” She stormed inside her sumptuous house, slamming the door behind her.
I paced the front lawn, trying to chill out. She was right about one thing: I was irrational. All that morning, when I wasn’t staring inside charred human remains at the coroner’s office and helping the LAPD with investigative leads, I’d been thinking about Savannah. She said she’d be waiting for me when we parted company outside the West Hollywood jail. In my anticipation and excitement, I had somehow gotten it into my horny schoolboy head that “waiting for me” meant more than it apparently did. Not that I ever expected her to meet me at the door naked. Then again, maybe I did. Hey, I’m male. But the one thing I definitely hadn’t expected was being greeted by an alleged dry cleaning magnate who resembled any number of Mossad and South African field agents of questionable loyalty who I used to cross paths with all the time. Maybe that’s what set me off, the way Katz looked. Hell, he probably was who he claimed to be — a nice, hardworking dry cleaner. Took pride in his work. Got the tough stains out.
I could’ve told her that I was sorry, but I knew that would be a giant time-waster. The Savannah I’d been married to was the kind of woman who took her time forgiving and forgetting — time being measured in weeks and sometimes months, depending on the perceived degree of transgression. Nothing in her behavior suggested to me that she had changed since our divorce. I was in for the cold shoulder, the silent treatment. I didn’t need any more of that. I got more than my share from Kiddiot.
Alameda emerged from the house to ask if I wanted a cold drink. What I wanted was a lift back to Rancho Bonita. She said she’d convey my request and went back inside. I could hear Alameda’s singsong words, muffled through the walls of Savannah’s nouveau riche villa paid for with her daddy’s money.
“You want to go back to Rancho Bonita?” Savannah said as she flung open the front door moments later and charged down the steps toward me. “Go on! Leave! Get out of my sight.”
She hurled her car keys at me, turned and marched back up the steps. The front windows rattled from the concussion of her slamming the door behind her.
I wished in that moment there was a way to rewind time. If only I’d checked the “Sorry, Can’t Make It!” box on the RSVP to the wedding of my old academy roommate instead of the box that said, “We/I’d Love To Come!!!” If only I had ducked out of the cathedral before the reception, before the buffet line, before divine providence compelled me to glance up from the sushi rolls I was piling on my plate and across the crowded catering hall — clichéd, I admit — there to meet the gaze of the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. If only I had gone and sat down and enjoyed my postnuptials nosh, or chatted up the minister or the bride’s mother. But by that point, I was on autopilot. Savannah Carlisle was engaged in conversation with some nerdy civil engineer doing his best to impress her with all the thrilling details of his latest highway drainage project. She was sipping a Manhattan and trying not to look bored as he blathered on.
“I came over here to ask you if you wanted a drink,” I said to her, ignoring the engineer, “but I have to tell you something right up front: I’m a little concerned.”
“Concerned about what?” she said, like I was about to ask her to donate one of her kidneys to me.
“Hey, buddy, we’re talking here,” the engineer said.
“We were just wrapping things up,” Savannah said to him with a polite smile.
The guy got the hint and retreated to the buffet table. She turned back to me.
“Concerned about what?” she repeated.
“Where all this is headed.”
She gave me a sideways glance. Intrigued but trying not to look like it. “Excuse me?”
“We talk, have a couple of drinks. You give me your number after I get up the nerve to ask for it. I wait the requisite number of days, then call. We go catch a flick, maybe grab a burger afterwards, get past all those pre-game sexual jitters, jump in the rack, and quickly develop one of those deeply satisfying emotional relationships that transcends the mere physical. We realize in short order that this thing has soul mate written all over it, so we decide to cohabitate. Next thing you know, we’re shopping for rings and swapping ‘I do’s.’We buy us a little house in the ’burbs. Picket fence, gardenias, the whole nine yards. You want a family, I want my own airplane, but, hey, what I want more than anything is to make you, the love of my life, happy. So we get pregnant. Now I’m resentful as hell of all the time you’re devoting to little Cordell junior. The romance fizzles. We knock out another kid or two, hoping to save the union, only now I’m putting in sixty hours a week to pay for all the violin and karate lessons, and the new minivan, and the snazzy granite countertops you just had to have. You’re so busy arranging play dates for the kids and playing chauffeur — when you’re not whipping out gourmet dinners that I’m too exhausted to eat after work because I’m slaving like a dog — that you start to let yourself go. Pretty soon, you’re wearing muumuus which, as everybody knows, are a big turn-off for any male who isn’t native Hawaiian. So, to cope with our nonexistent sex life and my male ego that requires constant reinforcement, I bed my buxom personal assistant which, of course, you find out about because I completely suck at lying.
Now we have to explain to our children the definition of ‘community property’ and why Thanksgiving at Daddy’s and Christmas at Mommy’s is really super-fun. It’s just so goddamn tragic. So here’s the deal: if you do decide to talk to me, let’s just keep the whole thing strictly carnal, OK?”
Savannah’s lips curled in a sly smile.
“Roses,” she said, “not gardenias. Preferably yellow.”
We talked until dawn. Two months later, we were hitched.
If only…
I bent down and picked up the car keys she’d thrown at me. A breeze had kicked up out of the west. What few clouds there were in the sky were high and gossamer thin. I would have preferred flying home. My ex-wife’s luxury sedan would have to do.
The sign said forty miles to Oxnard. The Jag was on cruise control. Traffic was sparse. I sang along to Bachman-Turner Overdrive’s “Let It Ride” turned up as loud as it would go. Nothing like a kickass road song and an unclogged stretch of highway to forget what ails you. I belted it out, not giving a damn whether any of my fellow motorists saw me or not.
My phone buzzed. I turned down the radio. Lamont Royale, Gil Carlisle’s right hand man, was on the line. He was curious to know whether the tip he’d passed along, about Janice Echevarria’s engagement ring and the death threat she’d allegedly made against Arlo, had borne fruit.
Janice may have been upset that Arlo Echevarria stole her ring, but she didn’t have him killed for it. Of that I was fairly confident. I was less certain about what role, if any, Janice’s second husband, Harry Ramos, had played in Echevarria’s death — and in that of Gennady Bondarenko. It was Ramos, after all, who had pitched Bondarenko on the merits of an oil venture in Kazakhstan in the weeks before Bondarenko’s death — the very same venture that my former father-in-law, his legal advisor, Miles Zambelli, and Russian business partner, Pavel Tarasov, were now pursuing. The murders of Echevarria and Bondarenko were unquestionably linked — forensics had shown they’d been shot to death with the same gun. But I wasn’t about to get into all of that with the right hand man of the guy who, quite possibly, had orchestrated both slayings.