“Gotta run, Bubeleh. I’m off to the doctor. We’re discussing post-op procedures. When this is all done, I’ll have the tummy of a thirteen-year-old Nubian princess. Who knows? Maybe I’ll finally get bat mitzvahed.”
“Give ’em hell, Mrs. Schmulowitz.”
Two fork-tailed fighter jets streaked overhead, F/A-18 Hornets climbing in trail out of the Navy’s air station at North Island. Somebody once said that piloting a combat aircraft at high speed is like having sex in the middle of a car crash — dangerous, a total rush, and when it’s over, it’s over fast. They forgot to mention that once you’ve flown combat aircraft, nothing else compares. The Hornets banked north in a sweeping right turn and headed out to sea. I was watching them wistfully when my phone rang.
“Just checking to make sure you made it to San Diego OK.”
“If I hadn’t made it, Savannah, your call would have gone to voice mail, would it not?”
“You don’t have voice mail, Logan.”
She was correct. One more thing I couldn’t figure out on my phone.
“You made it down in one piece, though?”
“I wasn’t involved in any midair collisions, if that’s what you mean.”
“Why are you being so obnoxious to me?”
“Why do you think?”
“Logan, Arlo’s gone — and my relationship with him began dying long before he did. I feel like I’m ready to move on with my life. I’m hoping you are, too.”
“His dying didn’t wipe the slate clean, Savannah. Walking out of a marriage isn’t some computer game. You don’t reboot and start over.”
“I understand that.”
“No, Savannah. I don’t think you do.”
I’m not sure I understood, either. If a man is lucky, he meets that one woman in his life and is forever transformed. She becomes all he thinks about, even when she’s no longer his. It’s like a favorite song you love and come to hate because you can’t get it out of your head. I wanted Savannah out of my head. And, at the same time, that was the last thing I wanted.
“In any case,” she said, “I have a surprise.”
“I hate surprises.”
“I’m aware of that, Logan. But maybe you’ll like this one.”
“Fire away.”
“I’d like to come down to San Diego, to stay with you for awhile, see how it goes.”
“I thought you wanted to go to neutral corners.”
“I did. I thought about it, and now I’d like to try again. We don’t have to go to SeaWorld if you don’t want to. I admit, I was being…”
“Petulant?”
Her tone took a sharp turn. “If you don’t want me to come down, Logan, just say so.”
I took awhile to answer, my heart thumping in my ears, a thousand disparate thoughts swirling inside my head. But even as I ruminated, I knew what I planned to say.
“I want you to come down.”
“You sure?”
“I wouldn’t have said it if I wasn’t.”
“Good, because I already bought a ticket.”
She said she was catching an 8:30 P.M. train out of Los Angeles’ Union Station, scheduled to arrive in San Diego at 11:15. I suggested she bring along plenty to read, considering that Amtrak in Southern California runs on time about as often as the Dodgers win the World Series.
“Can’t wait,” she said.
“Makes two of us.”
The dinner hour was approaching by the time I returned to Janet Bollinger’s apartment building. I parked up the street and walked back, not wanting to arouse the attention of her pot-smoking, gangbanging neighbor for fear he might set off alarm bells, but he was gone. An older, dark green Nissan Sentra with a dented back bumper that had a faded Castle Robotics parking permit on it took up the space directly in front of Bollinger’s unit. I could see diffuse light behind the angled mini-blinds covering the front window. She’d come home. I knocked.
“Janet? Hello? Avon calling.”
Nothing.
I knocked again, harder this time. That’s when I heard it — a moan so faint that at first I mistook it for the breeze blowing in off the ocean. I turned the knob. The door opened.
“Janet?”
I stepped inside. The place was Crate & Barrel tidy. A chamois-colored sofa with modern lines and a matching love seat dominated the center of the living room. There was a small set of decorative wooden shelves crammed with a collection of about twenty ceramic Hummel figurines. Above them on the wall hung a grouping of six family photos in inexpensive black frames. On another wall was a psychedelic-colored poster of San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge.
“Anybody home?”
From down a short hallway, a woman’s voice emanated faintly at the same instant my brain registered the distinctive coppery essence of freshly spilled blood.
“… Help me.”
I ran.
She was lying on her back. Slender, mid-thirties, shoulder-length auburn hair styled in what I suppose you’d call a shag. Her gray, pullover sweater was wet with red, as was the off-white Berber carpet beneath her.
“Please,” she mouthed silently, her eyes pleading.
I knelt, careful not to move her, and gently raised the sweater a few inches. Janet Bollinger had been stabbed in the upper abdomen. The seeping knife wound was deep and jagged at the edges, the result of what I assumed was a serrated blade.
“Hang tough, Janet. You’re gonna be fine. Stay awake now for me, OK?”
The bathroom was six feet away. I grabbed a hand towel off a rack near the door and yanked the floral comforter off her bed. Using the towel to apply pressure on the wound, I tucked the comforter around her as best I could to slow the onset of shock, then dialed my phone with my free hand.
“Nine-one-one, what is the nature of your emergency?”
“A woman’s been stabbed. She needs an ambulance.”
The emergency dispatcher took down the address, then asked me my “relationship to the victim.”
“Concerned citizen,” I said and hung up.
The towel already was soaked with blood. Janet closed her eyes.
“No sleeping on the job. C’mon, now, Janet. Stay with me, sweetheart.”
She was too weak to respond. Her face was ashen, her breathing shallow. I stroked her face softly while applying pressure with my other hand and waited for help to arrive.
There was nothing more I could do.
The paramedics arrived within three minutes. Janet Bollinger was en route to the emergency room less than five minutes later. Whether she would survive the six-mile drive to the nearest hospital, in neighboring Chula Vista, was anyone’s guess. The rescue crew loaded her into the ambulance in grim silence. I shared their unspoken skepticism. Like them, I too had seen my share of gravely wounded individuals.
“You say you knocked on Ms. Bollinger’s door the second time you came back and it was unlocked?”
“Unless I’m mistaken, I believe that’s what I just said.”
San Diego County Sheriff’s Detective Alicia Rosario cocked an eyebrow at my insolent response to her question as she jotted notes on a reporter’s pad. She was pretty in a cop kind of way. Black slacks, black pumps, black silk blouse, her black hair cut cancer-survivor short. Under her black leather jacket, below her left armpit, a nickel-plated, 9-millimeter Smith & Wesson rode in a hand-tooled leather shoulder rig.
Her prematurely balding partner, Detective Kurt Lawless was decked out in a charcoal gray suit, white oxford-cloth dress shirt, button-down, pink polka-dotted necktie, and burgundy wing tips buffed to a high shine. He looked like a magazine advertisement for Brooks Brothers.
“What I still don’t get,” Lawless said, studying my driver’s license as the three of us stood outside Janet Bollinger’s apartment, “is what you were doing down here in Imperial Beach, when you live all the way up in Rancho Bonita.”
I wiped Janet Bollinger’s blood from my hands with a towelette from Kentucky Fried Chicken I found in my pocket and repeated what I’d already told the two detectives. How Bollinger’s testimony had helped send Dorian Munz to death row. How Munz, before he was executed, had implicated Gary Castle in the slaying of Bollinger’s friend, Ruth Walker. And how Ruth’s war hero father had hired me to help refute Munz’s last-minute claim that the wrong man had been convicted of murdering her.