Grave Endings (18 page)

“I saw that, but I don't know his password.” Trina sounded dejected. She looked at the pad on which I'd made notes. “That's not twenty phone calls.”

“There were doubles, and some of the phone numbers were yours and your dad's.”

“Plus the one you wiped out,” Trina reminded me. “I wonder who that was.”

I knew who it was. I'd dialed the number hundreds of times and knew it by heart.

Aggie's parents' number. I had been stunned to see it, had felt sick.

I hadn't written the number down. Trina would probably think I'd deliberately eliminated the call, and that wasn't true. At least, I didn't think it was, although a little voice in my head said, “There are no accidents.”

twenty-five

I DIDN'T TELL ZACK, WHEN HE PICKED ME UP TWO hours later, though I was tempted. I did tell him about the other calls Randy had made and received.

“Two calls to Rachel's Tent, huh?” he said. “That's interesting.”

“Maybe he wanted his job back.”

“Did Bramer mention that?”

I shook my head. “Could be Randy didn't call for Bramer. Maybe he phoned Barbara Anik to make amends for lying to her all these years.”

“Ask her.”

“Maybe I will.”

I switched the radio to an oldies station and caught the middle of “Return to Sender.” “Address unknown,” I sang. I thought about “Doreen.” No such number? No such phone?

“I don't understand how the redhead had Brian's phone,” I said.

“Maybe she stole it. You can try his cell number later and see if he answers—or I can do it, since he's heard your voice.”

“She's probably from the San Diego area, Zack. Those unidentified calls must be from her.”

“How does that help you?”

“It doesn't.”

We rode awhile without talking. The Beatles were singing “Let It Be.” I wished I could.

“The pizza shop call bothers me,” I said. “If Randy was depressed the night he died, why would he order lasagna?”

“As opposed to a calzone?”

“Be serious.”

“You said he got a call from his agent. Maybe it was bad news. Now he's going to have a child to support, with a woman he doesn't trust. More pressure. That plus his guilt. . . . He orders food, has a beer to go with the lasagna. Another beer, then the Jack Daniel's. Next thing, he's shooting up.”

“Trina's convinced he was killed, Zack.”

“And the neighbor told you Randy confessed. How
is
your houseguest, by the way?”

“Restless. She keeps apologizing for being there, saying she doesn't want to put me in any danger. Speaking of which, Jim called.”

Zack whipped his head toward me, then returned his eyes to the road. “You promised you'd phone me right away.”

I could see his stern expression from his profile. “There was no reason. He doesn't know where Trina is. She handled it well. She warned him to leave her alone or she'd call the police.”

“Which she won't do,” Zack said. “Maybe she
does
have the package, and doesn't want to give it up.”

I'd considered that, too.

Minutes later Zack pulled up in front of Galit's house. The
ketubah
was beautiful, more beautiful than we'd imagined when we'd given the calligrapher a rough idea of what we wanted: a chuppa motif with flowers in shades of mauve, green, and blue. The text was perfect, too, including the wording that indicated that I'd been divorced. Galit told us the
ketubah
would be ready on Wednesday.

“Do you want to grab some lunch?” Zack asked when we were in the car on our way back.

I reminded him that Trina was in the apartment. “She's so sad, Zack. She lost her brother, someone trashed her apartment. I don't want to leave her alone for long.”

“And you want to ask her about the package, right?”

“That, too,” I admitted.

But Trina was gone.

I called her name when I stepped into my apartment. I looked in the kitchen. I knocked softly on the door to the guest room, in case she was taking a nap, and louder on the bathroom door. I looked in the small yard, though it was too chilly to sit outdoors. I checked my bedroom, too, thinking she might have wanted to use my computer, not sure how I felt about that. But she wasn't there, and nothing had been disturbed.

What if someone had followed us to my apartment, had waited until I wasn't home . . . ?

I hurried back to the guest room, and that's when I noticed that the sofa bed had been made and Trina's suitcase was gone.

And on my kitchen table I saw Randy's cell phone, on top of an envelope. Inside were two folded sheets of lined paper and a note.

Molly, thanks for everything. You and Zack are great,
and I hope you have a fabulous wedding. I feel bad
that I called you last night. I didn't know who else to
call, but I don't want to put you in any more danger.
I'm going to a hotel while I figure out some stuff. I
should of done it in the first place.

I'm leaving Randy's cell phone. You can give it back
to me later, whenever. You said you wanted to help
prove Randy didn't kill Aggie, so maybe you can try
those numbers again. I also left you a couple of pages
from his journal that I tore out. I didn't tell you about
them because I wanted to talk to you first and see if I
could trust you. He has names and addresses, and
some of them sound like the ones I saw on his computer files, but I'm not sure. I was going to check
them out, but I'm afraid to go anywhere. And I'd
probably mess things up, I wouldn't know what to
say to people and get them to talk to me. You're a reporter, you'd know. I don't know if any of those
names will help. Maybe it's nothing.

I'll call you in a couple of days. Don't worry, I'll be
okay.

P.S. The newspaper clippings were in the journal.

P.P.S. You can give Randy's phone to your cop friend.
You'll probably do it anyway, even without my okay. I
guess I should of given them everything right away.
Maybe they'll listen to you and treat this serious.

Trina

I reread the note and debated showing it to Zack. I knew what he'd say: Trina was using me. She'd phoned me instead of contacting family or friends and involved me in her drama because she'd counted on my persistent interest in Randy. Now she'd left his phone and a list of names and addresses to investigate.
I'd
probably mess it up. . . . You're a reporter, you'd know.

It occurred to me that she could have trashed her own apartment as bait, that she'd invented Jim, whose voice I'd never heard, not even this morning when he'd phoned her. That could have been someone else, someone she'd called “Jim” for my benefit.

In my mind I played back the past few days. I saw the terror in her face. Last night, this morning. On the street a few days ago when the truck backfired. Her terror was genuine, I decided. And so were Jim and his threats.

I wasn't as sure about Trina herself. Either she was completely ingenuous and had left the phone and the list because she was out of her league and needed my help, or she was playing on my ego and sympathy to sucker me into doing her work for her. The truth, I thought, was somewhere in between. And it didn't matter, because I was hooked.

Tucked inside the folded pages were three yellowed newspaper clippings. I caught my breath when I saw Aggie's face on the grainy paper of the first clipping. The article was dated July 24, the day after she was killed:

The body of a twenty-four-year-old woman fatally stabbed last night was found. . . . The victim, Aggie Lasher, was a social worker at Rachel's Tent. . . . If you have information, please call the Wilshire Division at . . .

Twenty-four years reduced to three paragraphs, I thought now, as I had six years ago.

The second clipping, dated July 28, was only one paragraph and asked again for the public's help in identifying Aggie's killer.

The third clipping, a July 14 column from the
Times
“Metro” section, which has since been renamed “California,” was a digest of crimes that had taken place the previous day. An ATM robbery in Glendale; a police-involved shooting in Alhambra; the discovery of the torso of an unidentified woman in a freshly dug grave in Griffith Park; a drug bust in Hollywood resulting in a third strike and probable life sentence for a thirty-year-old male; a gang shooting in Compton; a domestic violence arrest in the Wilshire area.

I read the column again and tried to see it through Randy's eyes, but I had no idea why he had kept it. Trina might know. I would ask her when I talked to her.

Or maybe this clipping was part of the lure. I reminded myself that I had to maintain a healthy skepticism about anything she had told me, including Randy's letters.

Setting the clippings aside, I scanned the entries on both pages: Some were names accompanied by addresses— street name and city; some names with only phone numbers; some addresses without name or phone number. Several addresses were just street names, with no city or other identifier. Some had initials. None of the complete addresses was in the San Diego area.

There were close to fifty entries, but I recognized only a few:

Roland Creeley
Alice Creeley
Benjamin and Ann Lasher
Barbara Anik
Anthony Horton
William Bramer

Randy had placed check marks next to all these names except Horton's. Check marks appeared next to many of the other names on both sides of the pages.

I wondered which name, if any, belonged to Randy's mother.

twenty-six

I THOUGHT I HEARD A TRILL OF SOMETHING DARKER than surprise in Mrs. Lasher's voice when she looked through the privacy window of the front door and said my name.

It could have been my imagination. Even if there
was
something, it disappeared by the time she opened the door and welcomed me with a warm smile and hug, and led me into the large kitchen that had been my second home.

Before Aggie's death, Mrs. Lasher had planned to remodel the kitchen and had spent hours poring over magazines, gathering samples and showing them to Aggie and me (“my two girls”), laughing ruefully because she couldn't make up her mind. She had laughed easily then, and often, and had sounded more like a schoolgirl than a fifty-eight-year-old mother. A year or so after Aggie died she had talked about resuming her project as though it was a chore she needed to cross off her list. “Dr. Lasher thinks it's time,” she told me.

But almost five years later the cabinets were still oak, and the flooring, an off-white linoleum with a brick pattern, was unchanged, as were the marbled beige Formica counters on which Aggie and I had prepared countless midnight snacks. I don't know if Mrs. Lasher wanted to preserve Aggie's memory or had simply lost interest.

She insisted on serving me a glass of milk with a slice of fresh banana cake warm from the oven. When we were teenagers, Aggie and I used to drizzle Hershey's chocolate syrup on top of the cake. I'm sure Mrs. Lasher remembered that, too.

The walls in the kitchen and breakfast room were still sponge-painted in cream with accents of apricot and, if you looked close, a little blue. I had first noticed the blue after staring at the walls during the night that had turned into morning with no word of Aggie. At a quarter after eleven I'd been polishing my nails while talking on another line when my brother Judah yelled, Pick up the phone, Molly, it's Mrs. Lasher. Was Aggie at our house? Mrs. Lasher asked me. Had I heard from her? She's probably with friends, I said, fanning my nails, impatient to return to my other call. She'll be home soon, you know she loses track of time. That girl, Mrs. Lasher said, not really worried about the daughter to whom she had given birth late in life after multiple miscarriages, the daughter she had tried not to smother. I wish she'd remember to turn on her cell phone, that's what it's for, she added with a note of exasperation that would probably stab at her forever, a sliver of glass beneath the skin, too small to find but always there.

“It's so sweet of you to stop by, Molly,” she told me now. “You must be so busy preparing for the wedding.” She was wearing a navy kerchief with a paisley design on hair that had turned quite gray.

“It's a little hectic,” I said. “Zack and I are so happy that you and Dr. Lasher are coming.”

“We wouldn't miss it. I'm sorry we didn't stay for the kiddush on Shabbos, but the last few days . . .” Her voice trailed off. “It was good news, but still, a shock.”

An hour after Mrs. Lasher's call on that July night, Dr. Lasher had phoned. He always speaks softly and slowly, weighing his words, but his voice was heavy with dread, each sentence more ponderous than the one before, a bowling ball gathering momentum as it rumbled along the lane. Aggie wasn't home, they hadn't heard from her, they'd contacted a number of women who had attended the vigil, no one had seen her, but there had been over five hundred women, so maybe . . . Did I have any idea where she might have gone? If you know something, Molly . . .

My father drove my mother and me to the Lashers'. There had been no police report of an accident involving Aggie's white Honda, Dr. Lasher told us when we arrived, no record of her having been admitted to a hospital. My mother and I sat with Mrs. Lasher in the sponge-painted breakfast room while my father accompanied Dr. Lasher in his dark olive green Infiniti to the Pico-Robertson synagogue where the vigil had been held. Mrs. Lasher set a bowl of fruit on the table and served coffee and cake that no one touched, and we said, five hundred women, maybe they just hadn't
seen
Aggie, or maybe she's in the ER, you know how disorganized Admissions can be, maybe she's hurt but not badly, God forbid, five hundred women, hurt but not badly, repeating it over and over like a mantra, until my father phoned and told my mother they had found Aggie's car a few blocks from the hall, her keys weren't in the ignition, there was no sign of foul play. That became our new mantra. No sign of foul play.

“I know this is such a hard time,” I said to Mrs. Lasher now, the burden of inadequacy as heavy today as it had been almost six years ago.

Mrs. Lasher sighed. “
Hashem firt der velt,
Molly.” God runs the world. “We can't ask questions. But at least now we have some answers.”

When the men returned that night, Dr. Lasher phoned the police, who told him a missing-person report isn't filed until someone has been missing twenty-four hours. Maybe your daughter met someone, a boyfriend, she'll probably show up in the morning, it happens all the time. My mother held Mrs. Lasher's hands while Dr. Lasher, in the careful, solid, unexcitable way that makes him an excellent internist, explained about the prayer vigil and five hundred women who hadn't seen his daughter, a daughter who had never been out this late, ever, who didn't have a boyfriend, whose car was parked two blocks from where she was supposed to be. What did they say, Benjy? Mrs. Lasher asked after her husband hung up the phone. They're checking out the car, he told her. An hour or so later two uniformed police showed up at the house and left with a photo of Aggie.

My parents and I stayed with the Lashers as the hours ticked by, though by now we were not alone. Dr. Lasher's sister and brother-in-law had arrived at some point, and Mrs. Lasher's brother. Mrs. Lasher fell asleep with her head on the breakfast room table, her hand on the phone receiver. When the first light of dawn stole through the slats of the wood blinds, the men went into the living room to recite morning prayers and began putting on their phylacteries. From the breakfast room I could see Dr. Lasher kissing the little leather boxes, with attached straps, that contained parchment with handwritten Torah verses. Fastening one box onto his left upper arm, he wound the straps around his arm and palm, secured the other box on the center of his forehead, then finished winding the first straps around his fingers. He had kissed the fringes of his
tallit
and wrapped himself in it when the police returned. We found your daughter, they said, words of hope hijacked almost before they were airborne. We're so sorry to tell you . . .

Dr. Lasher, tears streaming down his face, said,
“Baruch Dayan ha'emet.”
Blessed be God, the Righteous Judge. I think he had known when they found the car.

Mrs. Lasher's mouth opened in a wide
O
but for a second no sound emerged. Then she covered her ears so she wouldn't hear herself screaming Aggie's name. Her husband took her in his arms, stroked her back, murmured Chavi, Chavi, Chavi, rocked her until her shrieks subsided into groans, Chavi, Chavi, lowered her onto the sofa and administered a sedative from the black bag he asked my mother to bring from his study.

The other men resumed their prayers, but Dr. Lasher removed and folded his
tallit
and slipped it into a large blue velvet bag. (My father later told me that from the time Dr. Lasher heard that Aggie was dead until after her funeral, according to Jewish law he was an
onen,
absolved of all ritual observance and mitzvot.) He unwound his tefillin and, with tears streaming down his cheeks, kissed the leather boxes before winding their leather straps and tucking them into a small velvet bag that he placed into a larger one. Then he knelt at his wife's side, adjusted the blanket someone had spread over her, held her hand, and whispered to her for a few minutes before he left with the officers to identify his daughter's body.

I have wondered over the years whether Dr. Lasher kissed the boxes that morning out of habit, or acceptance of God's will. I remember being awed by and envious of the rocklike faith that enabled him to get through those first days. The urgent but quiet phone calls to his rabbi and others when the coroner's office insisted on an autopsy; more calls after the autopsy to the director of the Chevra Kadisha burial society, who assured him that all the organs had been returned to the body before it was transferred to the mortuary, where the body was ritually prepared by women for burial. The funeral. The burial, where Dr. Lasher rent his garment and threw shovelful after shovelful of red dirt onto the grave. I think he found more solace kissing those little black boxes than his wife did from the sedatives in his black bag.

“I hear that everyone at B'nai Yeshurun is very happy with Zack,” Mrs. Lasher said now. “He looks like a fine young man. And the Abramses seem very nice. What are their first names? I forgot.”

“Larry and Sandy.”

“Very, very nice. My husband said so, too. They're both attorneys, my husband said. Zack was going to be a lawyer, too, wasn't he? And then he learned in Israel. Everything is
bashert.
Which yeshiva?”

I told her. “Is Dr. Lasher home? I'd like to talk to him.”

“Your throat hurts?” She smiled. “How many times did he check your throat? Twenty? Thirty? And your brother—I think Dr. Lasher gave him stitches. Twice, I think. Which brother was that? Noah?”

“Joey.” She knows I'm here about Aggie, I thought. “Is Dr. Lasher busy?”

“He's learning. I hate to interrupt him when he's learning, Molly. He's so busy all week, late into the night, and sometimes weekends, too. When he finds a few hours for Torah, it's a luxury.”

“Mrs. Lasher—”

“Remember how sad you were when things didn't work out with Zack? And now they did. Everything is
bashert.
I heard your sister Edie made the
shidduch.
” The match. “She has three children, right? I was thinking of taking one of her Israeli dance classes. My friends tell me she's a terrific teacher. And Mindy? How many children does she have,
bli ayin hara
?”

“Two girls and a boy.”
Bli ayin hara,
I echoed silently.

“Beautiful,
kenehoreh,
beautiful.” She smiled again. “I'm sure your parents have a lot of
naches
from all of you. And Liora?”

“She goes on dates all the time. She hasn't met the right person yet.” There was a desperate quality to Mrs. Lasher's small talk, to her smiles. “I need to ask Dr. Lasher one or two questions, Mrs. Lasher. I won't take much of his time.”

“Maybe I can help you?”

I hesitated. “I just wanted to know what the detective told him.”

“You're a good friend to worry so much.” Mrs. Lasher took my hands. “He told us about this man Creeley. He needed money for drugs. He saw our Aggie walking. . . .”

Was it possible that she didn't know? Had Connors showed the letter that accompanied the locket to Dr. Lasher?
Don't tell my wife, she won't be able to bear it.

“I really need to talk to your husband,” I said.

She nodded and released my hands. “I'll tell him. I'm so glad you came by, Molly.”