Jen studied her and I could see her thinking, evaluating how far she could push without alienating Celeste. When she spoke, there was softness in her voice. “What happened with you and Bill? Why did you split up?”
Celeste looked out the French doors to the dark-bottomed swimming pool and the lush greenery surrounding it. “Bill was a very kind man, a sweet man. And he loved me very much.”
Jen let her sit in silence and stare at the sunlight glinting off the surface of the pool.
“As much as I wanted to,” Celeste said, “I could never love him the way he loved me. He saw a future for us that I never did. Lucy wasn’t planned. I knew he’d be such a good father and he wanted it so badly that I thought I had to try.”
Someone, I thought, had given him a chance.
“It took a long time, but he learned to live with our split. We were a good team when it came to Lucy. Larry and I were granted full custody and he just had visitation rights initially, but that didn’t last long. He was so good with her that we changed it to joint custody before she started school.”
“How is Lucy doing now?” Jen asked.
“She’s having a very hard time with it. They were still very close.”
We talked to her for a while longer. Celeste didn’t know much about Bill’s financial situation and seemed to be convinced that he was not nearly as well off as he actually was. I looked down at the melting ice cubes in the bottom of my glass, and at the expansive kitchen, and the leather sectional, and the warm white walls, and I thought I understood something about Celeste. Even with her genuine love for her daughter and her wistful affection for her ex-husband and her perceptive awareness of her family’s shared history, she was still a person who couldn’t seem to understand that someone might have money and not spend it.
“Patrick still hasn’t texted me back,” I said as Jen’s cell phone chirped with a new text message. “That’s not him, is it?”
We were passing USC. Waze had taken us back the way we came. The Long Beach Freeway was still jammed.
“No. It’s my mom. She wants to be sure you’re coming to the anniversary party.”
“Of course I am,” I said. “Tell her I said hi.”
After a moment, she said, “What did you text Patrick about?”
“I asked him for an update. Wanted to see if he came up with anything new.”
“Danny,” she said.
The tone in her voice made me turn toward her to be sure my partner hadn’t been replaced by a middle-school teacher. She didn’t need to say anything else. I knew I was pressing Patrick too hard. But I couldn’t let it go. It wasn’t that I didn’t trust him, I did. And I fully understood why I needed to be kept as far from his investigation as possible. My involvement could potentially taint the case if it came to trial. Ruiz was already bending the rules as far as he could. The fact that he hadn’t removed me from the squad and assigned me to a desk someplace until the whole case played out was all the evidence I needed of that. But, like most people, I sincerely believed that the rules should be different for me.
“You never answered my text,” I said to Patrick back in the squad room.
“Sorry about that,” he said, without looking up from his computer. “Nothing new to report. We’re still working the same leads. I’ll let you know when there’s something to tell you.”
I went back to my desk. What I was hoping to get from him, I didn’t really know. It made me think about all the times I’d blown off conversations with the family members of victims, and worse, with the victims themselves, before I transferred to Homicide. I wanted to believe that I’d never made them feel excluded, that I’d always made time for them, that I’d listened. But had I? How often had I hurried off the phone or hustled them out of the office because I had something else to do?
When I was five, my father, an LA County sheriff’s deputy, was killed on a routine domestic-disturbance call. I was far too young to understand what was going on, but in those hazy and distant memories of the time following his death, I seem to remember lots of