Hailey's War (8 page)

I was at the precinct for several hours. The police hadn't been sure at first what really happened. They couldn't get anything out of the grief-stricken nanny. I kept saying that Trey had run right out in front of me—which was true, though what else would you have expected someone who'd hit a child to say?

Fortunately, there had been pedestrians who'd seen the accident—not the usual “I heard squealing brakes and shattering glass and turned to look,” but people who'd actually seen Trey Marsellus run from his nanny and dart from between two parallel-parked cars.

As the traffic sergeant said to me, “We're not going to hold you, but don't leave town, okay? Not until we've closed the official investigation.”

I agreed, walked stiffly out the front door, and went to the hospital. I had an immediate and all-consuming need to apologize to the family.

I hadn't succeeded. Two very large young black men, with tattoos and exquisitely tailored suits, blocked my way. “The family's not seeing anyone right now,” one of them said.

At the time, the question
Who are these guys?
didn't occur to me. I was mentally numb, except for being fixated on making this right. “I need to talk to them,” I said. “I'm the one who—”

“The family's not seeing anyone,” he said again, and I broke off, finally realizing they were serious.

CJ, who'd gone to the precinct too late, found me as I was walking back to visitor parking. He was pale and shaken, almost as if he'd been the one to hit a child, but he was immediately supportive. He took me back to his place, where I paced, angry and guilty, saying over and over that the kid had run right in front of me, that the sun was in my eyes, that I couldn't have stopped.

“I know, baby,” CJ said. Then he asked me to repeat the boy's name.

“Trey Marsellus,” I said.

“Mmm,” he said.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“What?” I persisted.

“I think you might've hit Luke Marsellus's kid,” he said, pensive.

“Who?” I'd said.

An hour later it was on the news: Rap mogul's son killed in Wilshire Boulevard accident. I still didn't get it. The news reports cast him only as a respected music-world figure, not as Marsellus the South Central OG.

I should have known something was really wrong when CJ picked up a pack of cigarettes a friend had left on the coffee table and tapped one out. CJ almost never smoked, so this meant he needed something to do with his hands, which meant he was nervous. Which was bad, because CJ was almost never nervous.

“Are you okay?” I asked. Stupid question, considering.

“Yeah,” he said. He lit the cigarette, exhaled smoke, and said, “Listen, give the family a couple of days, all right? Marsellus is …”

“Is what?”

“He's kind of heavy.”

“I can't turn my back on this,” I said.

“I know,” he said, “but I need to think about how best you should approach him.”

As it turned out, CJ never did hit on the right way for me to talk to Marsellus
. Something else happened first that changed everything.

Two days later, I was awakened by my phone ringing at ten-fifteen in the morning. I picked up the receiver and found myself talking to the traffic sergeant who'd taken my statement and then kicked me loose. His question was direct and to the point: Had Miss Beauvais, Trey's au pair, been in touch with me?

No, I said, why would she have been?

I'm just checking in with you, he'd said.

Not seeing any significance, I tried to go back to sleep—I hadn't been sleeping well at night—but an hour later, CJ was pounding on my door.

“Take it easy, would you,” I said, pushing hair out of my eyes and letting him in.

“Pack up your things,” he said as soon as I'd closed the door behind him. “Not everything, just what you really want.”

“What?” I thought it was a joke, though he seemed genuinely on edge.

“Trey's nanny is missing. The cops are looking for her. Nobody's seen her. Pack up just what you need, I'm getting you out of L.A.”

I pulled back. “What are you trying to say?”

CJ ran his hands through his hair. “Just listen to me, Hailey. I didn't want to scare you the other night, but as soon as you told me Trey Marsellus's name, I was thinking of something like this. I hoped I was overreacting.”

“Something like what?”

“This happened in New York,” he said. “A mobster's son was hit by a car, by accident, and not long after that, the neighbor who did it just disappeared.”

I said, “You of all people know that ‘gangsta' is just a figure of speech. Marsellus isn't really a gangster.”

“Yes, he is, Hailey.” He paused. “I hear things, and maybe I don't know for sure what's rumor and what's fact, but I meant what I said the other day, when I called Marsellus ‘heavy.' He's not a ‘no harm, no foul' kind of guy. And he and his wife tried for years to conceive before finally having Trey. She hasn't been pregnant again since. What does that tell you?” He answered his own question: “You took from him the one thing that can't be replaced.”

My face felt hot. “Don't you think I feel bad enough—”

“You're not
listening,”
he said. I'd never heard CJ sound so frustrated. “Goddammit, what's it going to take to get through to you? You can feel as bad as humanly possible; it won't help. You killed this guy's only son. ‘Sorry' isn't going to fix it.”

I said, “But if he's really the kind of man you say, I think not apologizing and then running away is only going to make it worse.”

“There isn't a way to make it better.”

“But—”

“No,” he said, taking both my hands in his. “I know what you're thinking of, all that honor-and-duty bullshit you never really left behind, but that doesn't apply out here, and it's going to get you killed. West Point is over, and now L.A. is over for you, too. Pack your things.”

What convinced me that he was right was this: His hands were very slightly shaking. It had been a long time since I'd felt those kind of nerves, so his anxiety served as a kind of external gauge for me, of what I should be feeling but wasn't.

“Are you sure about this?” I'd said.

“I don't like it, either, baby,” he'd said quietly. “But this is how it's gotta be.”

To this day I don't know if there were any ramifications, criminally, for my
leaving town before the traffic division's investigation was officially closed. It had just been a formality, but the cops took a dim view of people skating when they'd been told to stick around. It was possible
that if I was ever picked up on something minor in San Francisco, I'd be shipped back to Los Angeles and charged with some kind of obstruction. It wasn't the charge that would be problematic, but jail would actually be the easiest place for Marsellus to get at me. Anyone gang-connected could.

CJ would have stayed longer with me in San Francisco, but I hadn't let him. When we parted, we'd both acted with exaggerated casualness. He'd said, “Look, I'll come up and visit you soon. I'll be around so much you'll be sick of me,” and I'd said, “Sure, I know,” and we'd hugged and then he'd driven away, toward the 101 back home.

In those first weeks, I'd lived with a drab, hollow feeling not unlike how addicts describe their first day without alcohol or a cigarette:
Is this what my life's going to be, from here on out?
I'd alternated between that sense of lonely tedium and a stomach-clenching guilt. I'm not sure those feelings ever went away, but they did lessen. In time, I found an adrenaline-junkie job and threw myself into it. I made more money than I needed and stashed it carelessly in a coffee can. I made a few friends and drank with them. Drank without them, too. I met Jack Foreman.

But I still felt restless at times, particularly in early summer, when business at Aries was slowest and San Francisco was shrouded in the kind of weather coastal Californians called June gloom. That was probably why, in the end, I called Serena back and told her I'd take a girl I'd never met to the mountains of inland Mexico.

Several days later, sometime after nine in the evening, I was parked in front
of a house in a working-class section of Oakland. It was an inexpensively well-kept place, with a small trimmed lawn, and no weeds between the stepping-stones that led to the house. There was a geranium by the front door, blooming red. This was where Nidia Hernandez was staying with friends.

Shay had looked pretty sour when I told him I was taking nearly two weeks off, but there was nothing he could do. I was an independent contractor; I worked, or not, at both my will and his. He could have fired me just as easily.

That afternoon, packing had been quick and easy. Hot-weather clothes, one heavy jacket for the evenings. A recently purchased guidebook to Mexico. A bottle of Bacardi and several minis of Finlandia, tucked protectively between layers of clothing. The little care package Serena had sent to me—a sheaf of twenties and fifties, the promised expense money, and a handful of Benzedrines wrapped in foil, to help me stay alert on the road. The rest of my pay would wait until I was on my way back up north; Serena and I had arranged that I'd stop at her place and we'd settle up then.

Finally I'd cleaned and oiled the Airweight, which was now taped under the front seat of the car I'd rented. I didn't expect any trouble in Mexico. I was just being careful.

A young man with a peach-fuzz mustache answered the door when I knocked. “Are you Hailey?” he said.

“I'm in the right place, then.”

“Yeah, hello, yeah,” he said, and moved aside. I stepped into a
narrow entryway of brown-checked linoleum, and the boy called to someone farther back in the house in Spanish so rapid I didn't catch much of it, except for Nidia's name.

A middle-aged woman came around the corner into the entryway. She was thin, with red-tinted hair pinned up on her head.

“Is it her?” she said in a gently accented voice. “Oh, please come in. My name is Herlinda.”

“Hailey,” I said.

“Come into the kitchen.”

I followed her. The floorboards felt slightly warped under my feet, and the house smelled of many, many meals cooked there. We rounded a corner, and I got my first look at Nidia Hernandez.

She was sitting in a chair slightly pushed back from the kitchen table, two scuffed suitcases at her feet. I could see where she'd draw unwanted masculine attention. Her hair was cinnamon-colored, in curls weighed down into near-straightness by their length. Her eyes were green-brown, and she had a heart-shaped face. She wasn't very tall—maybe five-two—and slender except for the little potbelly a lot of girls had nowadays, the obsession for flat abs being over. She looked from Herlinda to me.

“Hey,” I said. “I'm Hailey.”

“Thank you for coming,” she said.

“I was sorry to hear about your boyfriend. Serena told me,” I said.

She nodded and said something that I thought was “Thank you” but couldn't be sure: She was that quiet. We both looked to Herlinda to take over.

Herlinda did, fixing hot chocolate and offering pan dulce, both of which I accepted, although I wasn't hungry. Then she spread a map of Mexico on the table and began the debriefing I'd been promised. “Have you ever been to Mexico?” she asked.

“To Baja California, yes,” I said.

“Did you drive?”

I nodded. It had been CJ's idea, a road trip to a seaside town he'd heard about.

“Good,” Herlinda said. “So you know a little about driving on Mexican roads.” Even so, she went on to tell me things I'd already heard: that in isolated areas, drivers tended to go down the center of the road until they saw oncoming traffic, and that it was common for both parties to be jailed in case of a traffic accident. If I were in one, she said, I should be exceedingly polite to the police and keep my ears open for the subtle implication that a bribe would clear the whole thing up. I nodded assent. Her son leaned against the refrigerator and listened.

Then Herlinda turned her attention to the map. I saw a star, hand-drawn in ink, in the northern Sierra Madre region.

“That's where we're going?” I said.

“It's the nearest town to the village,” Herlinda said.

My confusion must have shown on my face—I didn't understand the distinction she was making—so Herlinda said, “You won't take Nidia all the way; the road isn't passable by car. You'll take her to this town, and you'll see the post office there. It has a Mexican flag over it. Take Nidia inside, and the postman will take her up to the village when he goes with the mail. They do it all the time, her mother says.”

“If the road's not passable by car, how does the postman go up? Horseback?”

Herlinda smiled. “He has four-wheel-drive.”

I was embarrassed at my assumption. “If I'd known,” I said, “I could've got something with four-wheel.”

Herlinda shook her head. “It's not just that,” she said. “The road's narrow and it's steep, and I guess city Mexicans don't do well with it.” She left the obvious unsaid:
Not to mention gringos
.

Then she looked up at the kitchen doorway. I followed her gaze and saw a thin girl of maybe twelve or thirteen there, wearing a long pink nightshirt.

“You're supposed to be in bed,” Herlinda told her.

“I wanted to say good-bye to Nidia.”

I moved from the kitchen counter and told Nidia, “I'll take your
bags out to the car,” thinking they'd want privacy for their good-byes.

Outside, I sat behind the wheel of the car I'd rented, a powerful V6 Impala
. When I'd first driven it that afternoon, I felt a small rush of elation and power. Then, just as quickly, I'd been stabbed by a memory: Wilshire Boulevard and a hard thump from the front end of my car.