Part 5 (1/2)

I realized it might be good to have a living client, especially because the man who had hired us yesterday was dead and Peralta had lied to the Phoenix Police, saying he had never even come into our office. I took the cash and wrote out a receipt for it on a blank sheet of paper.

He rooted around in the kitchen and returned with a flash drive. ”This has her client list. The regulars.”

”Have you seen it?”

He shook his head. I could understand why he wouldn't want to look.

I took it and told him we'd be in touch, but that he should call me when he got to Riverside.

His voice stopped me as I was halfway out the door.

”Thank you again for changing the baby. Do you have kids?”

I didn't answer.

”They totally change the way you look at life.”

9.

Personal history: the day I arrived in San Diego to take an a.s.sistant Professor of History position at the same university that Grace Hunter would later attend, I drove all the way to the end of Interstate 8. It put me in Ocean Beach. I had never been there before. Unlike today, when I was growing up Phoenicians didn't go to San Diego every summer by the tens of thousands. I had visited the city a total of one time before, staying at Hotel Circle in Mission Valley. I had no idea of this magical enclave called Ocean Beach.

But that day I had taken the freeway as far as it would go. After growing up in the desert and then spending several years completing my Ph.D. and teaching in the Midwest, it was as if I had landed in my own little paradise. Ocean Beach immediately felt like home. That evening I walked the 1,971 feet to the end of the munic.i.p.al pier, turned around, and looked at the neighborhood as it rose up to the spine of the Point Loma Peninsula. The lights in the houses looked like j.a.panese lanterns and I made a vow out loud: ”I'll never leave.”

A few hours before, I had rented my apartment a block-and-a-half from the ocean. I was neither a surfer nor much of a beach person. As a native Phoenician, the idea of tanning went along with the promise of ruined skin soon and melanoma later. But I loved O.B. The only thing that could pry me out was that I loved Patty more.

Patty.

I met her at the ugly main San Diego State University library. We both reached for the same book at the same time, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. She was an English professor and, with the Sharon Stone jaw line, cla.s.sic Wayfarers, and lush wheat-yellow hair, you might mistake her for another shallow Southern California beauty. With the millionaire developer father and house in La Jolla, you might a.s.sume she was spoiled, too.

I never made that mistake. I judge a woman by the books she reaches for.

My life was so unfurnished when we met. I had a fairly new doctorate in history, boxes of books, and the old house in Phoenix that had belonged to my grandparents, now rented out. I happily let her help make me the man I became, in all good ways. She taught me how to open a Champagne bottle like a man of the world. Opened my ears to jazz.

Patty appreciated my love of history, ability to dress well, being ”debonair,” as she put it, for turning out well-balanced and kind, despite having lost my parents before I could even remember them. She called me a mensch, one of the best compliments I ever received.

It pleased her that I loved ethnic food and had a very dry sense of humor and possessed an eclectic past that included working for five years as a deputy sheriff trained by a tough older cop named Peralta. I had published my first book, Rocky Hard Times: The Great Depression in the Intermountain West, and it had been favorably reviewed. This also pleased her. We made a sophisticated, good-looking couple. But I knew I was marrying up.

She spoke French well. Not well enough to satisfy the most obnoxious waiter in Paris, but her French was better than my Spanish. Thanks to Patty, I learned fun and useful phrases: cherchez la femme, which proved to be true in cracking one cold case. Dragueur, a skirt chaser. Terribles simplificateurs: the world was full of those, Arizona especially. Billets-doux: love letters, the writing of which she excelled. La pet.i.t mort: o.r.g.a.s.m. The vocabulary she had taught me was coming back now with the sea breeze.

It was things like this that made me cluelessly happy being with her.

I was one of the few who were allowed to call her Patty. To the rest of the world, she was Patricia. She teased me about spray-painting her name on a wall of I-5. For a long time, I wondered if we would have stayed together if I had committed that simple act of vandalism, decorating the concrete spaghetti with eight letters, leaving drivers to wonder what pa.s.sion had stirred a man to do such a thing?

A man who would have done that could have kept up when she got on tenure track at the University of California at San Diego, an infinitely more prestigious appointment. He would not have been content being a good teacher, nor would he have bridled at the intentionally dull and social-science-y conventions of academic historiography.

He would have realized that even if I didn't feel in compet.i.tion with her, she expected me to overachieve, as her father had demanded of her. The impetuous one with the spray paint would have done more than appreciate, support, and learn from her seemingly infinite avocations, from cooking to film history and painting. He would have tried harder to match her imaginative gift giving even though it couldn't be done.

That man sure as h.e.l.l would have focused on publis.h.i.+ng more so as to ensure tenure at second-rate San Diego State.

Who knows? I can argue this history one way and then the other. Partic.i.p.ants don't usually make good historians. Even Churchill had his flaws. As for Patty, she was needy and broken, too. She was as insecure as I was. Our insecurities together acted as an accelerant to burn up our marriage. I taught her things of the world, too, made her happy for a time. The collapse of our marriage wasn't all my fault. Just mostly my fault.

I am too close to the events to recount them dispa.s.sionately.

I do know two things. One is that we married too soon. We weren't the people we would become. And I know a simple, transcendent fact...

10.

She was the Glory f.u.c.k of My Young Life.

11.

Now I stood at the end of the same pier, the longest on the West Coast if I remembered correctly. A man fished off the south side and pairs of lovers strolled out toward me. My chest was tight and I could feel my heart trying to make its escape, my throat tightening. It was merely a panic attack. I knew that now. They never came in situations where a normal person would panic, only when I was quiet and alone. If I couldn't stop them, at least I could get away from other people so the attacks wouldn't cause me to do something inappropriate. Like tell the truth. Whatever.

I thought again about Patty. Contrary to Peralta's baiting, I wasn't afraid of seeing her. It would be nice, actually, to know she was happy.

As for my native prudence, that had gone away in the preceding months. Now I had barged into a stranger's apartment and a.s.saulted a man with a move that could kill, and I wasn't even a cop anymore. Get me a can of spray paint.

I wondered if she remarried and had children.

Now it was hard to imagine that lost love as even real, especially after Lindsey.

I remembered the Fussell book Patty and I had both been reaching for. Writing about World War I, he meditated about how our age couldn't understand why hundreds of thousands of British soldiers had gone ”over the top” to certain death from German machine gunners for something as abstract as honor. But for them, that sense of honor and obligation was as real as our age, drowning in illegitimacy and irony, is for us.

What a pity. Quel dommage.

I had brought Lindsey to O.B. exactly once, when we had first become a couple and I worried that I was falling for her too fast, this magical younger woman with the fair skin and nearly black hair. She had browsed the postcards and made fun of the tourists. The memories caused me to pull out my iPhone and text her: ”I'm in San Diego with Peralta, on a case.”

It was a fool's errand. She wouldn't respond. I didn't say I loved her, even though I did. Why set myself up for the disappointment of her silence? She wasn't wearing her wedding ring now. I still wore mine, even though I operated heavy equipment: large-caliber firearms. I studied my ring and my hands that had changed the baby. I didn't even know the baby's name, but I remembered his tiny hands and arms struggling against me, struggling against a world of trouble.

This little soul who hadn't asked to be brought into that world. I didn't even know his name.

That tattooed kid who was his father had better be on his way to Riverside.

Lindsey had worried whether she would make a good mother.