Guns and Roses (48 page)

Gia shrugged and stared at her hand. The fingers trembled slightly. “He was in my Bio class.”

“Was yesterday the first time you… went out?”

She glanced at him briefly, then away. “We didn’t go out. Me and some friends went to his fraternity for the party.”

“But you and he spent time alone.”

“After a while, yeah, I mean, we all drank together. And we had pizza delivered. But later…” She shrugged.

“I don’t mean to upset you,” Joe said. And he didn’t, though this was a tricky juncture; depending on which way this went, it could shift the course of the questioning. “I was just wondering what went wrong.”

For a long time Gia said nothing at all. Joe had to force himself not to glance at the wall of glass, where he knew Trina was watching.

Then she looked up, and he was surprised to see fat tears brimming in her eyes.

“I don’t remember.”

~*~

By late afternoon, Joe was in the family room of his parents’ condo in Fremont, lifting a spoon to his father’s slack mouth. When Joe and Omar were kids, they’d spent most afternoons stretched out on the floor of this room in front of the television, Omar hogging the remote. Omar was firstborn, by seventeen months, and even as a child, he’d taken easily to privilege, never questioning his right to the top bunk, the second chicken leg, the front seat when Joe and Omar accompanied their father to the tobacco shop on Sundays.

Joe had been the disappointing son, the one who frustrated his parents by not living up to his potential. But it was Joe who returned to Fremont every Sunday to visit with Haroon, to tackle the list of chores Shamim had been compiling all week. Omar, saddled with a wife and two young kids, visited his parents whenever he could, swinging by after work with takeout from Shalimar, which had been their father’s favorite.

Joe and Omar had taken markedly different paths in life: Omar with his arranged marriage, his sprawling house in the Silver Creek Hills in San Jose, his high-tech industry job with people reporting to him in thirteen states—versus Joe, who’d spent years working private security before finally becoming a cop in the affluent community of Montair and surprising everyone by being promoted to detective in a record-setting four years on the job.

The brothers maintained the same close bond that they’d always had. Omar and Yasmin constantly tried to set Joe up on blind dates; the entire family begged him to settle down. They’d even given up hope of him marrying a Pakistani girl. Any woman willing to give his parents grandchildren—that seemed to be the only requirement these days.

“Come on,
Abba
,” Joe murmured. “A little more.”

On the spoon was
aloo gobhi
, once his father’s favorite. Shamim still made it for him on Sundays. Haroon had no trouble helping himself to seconds until a warm autumn night nearly a decade ago when he came out of the Rite Aid on Grimmer Boulevard, carrying his wife’s blood pressure prescription in a plastic sack, and was savagely beaten in the parking lot behind the store. The police quickly arrested his attackers, a pair of drunken electrical contractors who’d driven in from Castro Valley looking for trouble, but unfortunately couldn’t tell a Lahore-born accountant from a would-be jihadist.

Since the attack, Shamim did an admirable job attending to her husband’s needs, according to the continuing care workers with whom she occasionally urged Joe to speak. Mostly, she needed Joe to come for a few hours on Sunday so that she could get her hair done and do her shopping for the week.

Joe stole a glance at his watch, though his surreptitiousness was unnecessary — Haroon’s mental capacity was on par with a toddler’s—and saw that it had been only forty minutes since his arrival. Once he got his father fed, he would tack down the carpet that had begun to come loose from the edge strip in the doorway of his parents’ bedroom and take a look at the kitchen sink, which was, according to his mother, draining slowly. After that, there would be nothing to do but watch television until his mother returned, when he’d bring up all her purchases from the car and tell her that he and his father had had a great time together.

Then he’d bolt, fueled by his own guilt.

His phone rang.

“Detective Bashir,” he said, turning away from his father, who had a wet rime of orange sauce around his lower lip and was staring out the window and pinching a fold of his trousers between his fingers, his crabbed hands working the fabric restlessly.

“She took roofies,” Trina said. “They showed up on her tox.”

“Who?”

“Gia Hanover. And look, I went ahead and had Odell bring Robby Singh back. I thought we should talk to him some more. This frat shit’s messed up, half the girls we talked to are afraid to have a drink at those parties. How fast can you get back up here?”

As Joe listened, his body cramped and uncomfortable in the dainty upholstered chair his mother used when she fed her husband, he tracked the details Trina relayed with only a fraction of his brain. The rest he focused on pushing back against the complicated tide of guilt, resentment, anxiety that washed over him whenever his family obligations intruded on his job.

He told Trina that he’d get there as quickly as possible and tried his mother again. She didn’t answer her phone, of course. She had promised to try harder, mostly at the urging of her two grandchildren, who at eight and ten were incredulous that anyone, especially their
Daadi
, would be unavailable to them at any hour of the day. Joe imagined the phone stuffed deep in his mother’s fake Coach handbag with the ringer turned off and muttered under his breath as he hung up and dialed Omar.

“Hey, Jamshed.” Omar had never called Joe by the name he adopted in high school, even after his parents relented.

“Omar, I need to you to come sit with Dad—Mom’s not picking up and I have to go back in.”

“Oh, damn, love to but we’re up in Mendocino. There’s a goat farm at this creamery where the kids can—”

“How fast can you get back?” Joe interrupted, a little more forcefully than he’d intended.

There was a pause, and when Omar spoke again, his voice was concerned. “Yasmin’s taken Taj over to the gift shop. It’s crazy here, the crowds. It’ll take us at least an hour, hour and a half to get back to the city and that’s after we—”

“Never mind.” Already, Joe was keeping Trina waiting. A longer delay was out of the question.

“You know I would, if I could,” Omar said. “And listen, any time you need me to take a Sunday, you just need to give me a little notice and I can—”

“That’s not how it works.” Joe regretting snapping as soon as he spoke. “I’m sorry. Look. I’ll call you tomorrow, maybe I can come see the kids one night this week, take ‘em for pizza or something.”

“Sure. Okay.” Relieved now that the situation was resolved, Omar sounded affectionate, if distracted. “Give Dad my—”

But Joe had hung up before Omar could say it—
love
.
Give Dad my love
, a word his brother had no trouble uttering as if it was nothing. Even when they were kids, Omar had been that way. The affectionate one, the one who cried at his wedding to a woman he barely knew. The one who worried that Joe was missing out—on marriage, kids, hell, a barbecue grill and a minivan. More than once Joe had used the excuse that someone had to take care of their parents, but at its core, he knew the excuse was a hollow one.

A knock at the door interrupted his volatile mix of frustration and guilt. Joe crossed the room in seconds— the condo, two bedrooms and a bath and a half on the second floor, shaded by a sycamore and overlooking the parking lot, was small—and yanked open the door to find himself staring at a wild-haired woman holding a child’s hand and a bunch of paper flowers on pipe cleaner stems.

“Oh,” the woman said, blushing. Her hair was silvery except for sunset stripes of pink and orange at the ends that curled around her neck, truly the most unusual color job Joe had ever seen. Her eyes were a startling shade of green, and her curvaceous figure was only partially obscured by an old sweatshirt, which was spattered with glitter and paint. The child was a skinny, tough-looking little girl with a pixie cut and red corduroy overalls and scabs on her elbows, who stood there grinning up at him as though she’d won a bet. “Is, um, Shamim here?”

“I’m afraid my mother has gone to do some errands.”

The little girl suddenly slipped out of her mother’s grip and feinted past Joe’s legs and into the apartment. “Haroon! Haroon!” she called at the top of her lungs.

“Jo-Jo! Get back here!” The woman’s blush deepened even further, and she rolled her eyes at Joe. “I’m so sorry. She’s taken a real shine to… is Haroon your father?”

“Uh… yes.” Joe automatically stepped aside to let the woman enter, his ingrained courtesy overcoming his better instincts. This visit was only going to delay his departure further. Maybe he could get Mrs. Nazar, his mother’s friend from the third floor, to come down, only he wasn’t sure which apartment she lived in and he didn’t have her phone number.

“I’m Holly Herron,” the woman said. Preoccupied with the immediate challenge of getting back to Montair, Joe had failed to curb his gaze, and he had to jerk his attention away back to the woman’s face. He’d been admiring her hips, which were round and generous in a stretchy black skirt of the sort some women wore to the gym. Her legs were pale and nicely shaped, and she was wearing little, short socks that barely showed above her sneakers. They had a rainbow stripe along the top. “I’m a friend of your parents. This is my daughter. We live down the hall, and, well, Josephine made your dad some flowers.”

“They’re roses!”

Josephine apparently shouted everything she had to say. Curiously, Joe didn’t mind. He loved his niece and nephew, but the effort of cajoling Madiha and Taj to allow him into their world—a place of elaborate make-believe with ever-changing rules—exhausted him. He’d come to accept he just wasn’t cut out for kids—but the wiry girl who snatched the homely bundle out of her mother’s hand intrigued him.

She held out the bouquet, a bright, but lumpy, paper-and-paint affair decorated with the same glitter that was on her mother’s shirt. Joe dutifully admired them, touching a petal that was stiff with paste.

“I’m Joe.” He held out his hand to Holly, and she took it in hers and squeezed, once. Her skin was cool and soft.

“I know.” Her smile made her eyes crinkle, an effect that somehow made her look even prettier. “Your mother talks about you all the time.”

“
I’m
Jo!” the little girl shrieked, jumping up and down. She ran across the room and squirmed up into the wheelchair with Haroon, who smiled and spoke some of his nonsense syllables. There was more life in his eyes now than Joe had seen in weeks. “I’m Jo and you’re Joe.”

“Uh, I guess that’s right,” Joe said. He turned his attention back to Holly. “I’m afraid—well, I’ve just been called in. My mother’s not answering her phone and—”

“Oh, we’ll be happy to stay until she gets back,” Holly said without hesitation. “I know all about what you do. I’ve stayed with him before. Go ahead, really.”

What you do
—Joe grimaced, wondering what version his mother had shared. Her disappointment that he hadn’t finished his engineering degree at Berkeley had tainted her attitude toward everything Joe had done since.

Though it hardly mattered. Holly Herron, neighbor of his parents, had made an offer he couldn’t refuse. He supposed she was likely to be at least as handy in case of emergency as he himself, which was to say, not very; all of Joe’s professional skill and competence somehow evaporated when he returned to his childhood home.

“I hate to ask you to give up time on your day off—”

“I have tomorrow off. I just came off nine days on.”

“Nine days? That’s rough,” Joe said, though he often worked longer stretches himself. “What kind of work do you do?”

“I’m a 911 dispatcher. A couple of my coworkers were out sick—just one of those things. I don’t mind.”

Joe raised his eyebrows. He had kept in touch with a few of the guys on the Fremont force since the investigation into his father’s beating. They would know all of the dispatchers. He could ask… what? What exactly would he ask a fellow cop about this intriguing neighbor of his parents? Joe pushed the thought away.

“Wow, I don’t know what to say, that would be really—”

“Just say thanks,” Holly said, giving him a sunny grin as she reached for the spoon and bowl he’d abandoned on the table.

~*~

It wasn’t until Joe had his earpiece in, headed north on 680 an even ten miles over the speed limit, that he realized he’d left his phone on his mother’s kitchen table.

He smacked the steering wheel in frustration. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it meant he’d have to make the trip back to Fremont when he was finished at the station. Another fifty-mile round trip. It was the confusion over his father, Joe assured himself, even as he thought again of Holly’s crazy hair, the smudge of golden glitter on her neck.

The sun was dipping low in the sky when he arrived at the Montair station. He parked hurriedly and met Trina in the hall.