Thieves Get Rich, Saints Get Shot - By Jodi Compton Page 0,40

and a brief snippet of Lucius “Luke” Marsellus getting out of a black Escalade and walking into the offices of his record label in L.A.

Marsellus? I set down my plastic fork and looked at the banner at the bottom of the screen. It read, BREAKING NEWS: MURDER SUSPECT HIT, KILLED CHILD IN TRAFFIC ACCIDENT.

“Oh, great,” I said.

The show’s host was saying, “This terrible story, these two murders up in San Francisco, the story just keeps getting more tangled, everything we hear just keeps getting worse.” She spoke not in sentences but in strings of clauses, with drawling emphasis on the key words. “The news late today out of Los Angeles about a traffic fatality in which—”

“Well, you knew that shit was gonna come out,” Serena said philosophically.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said.

On the screen the host was now talking to a remote guest, identified as a “psychologist and popular author.” Serena was about to speak again, but I held up a silencing hand.

“Now, Dr. Schiffman,” the host said, “what we’re hearing about this young woman, this suspect, more and more we’re seeing a picture of someone whose life has gone very wrong, who set herself this very high goal of going to the U.S. Military Academy and then failed at that; she later, for whatever reason, is responsible for the death of a small child.… Dr. Schiffman, what kind of effect would this string of, I guess you’d say missteps and failures, have on the psyche of a young person like Hailey Cain?”

The psychologist, a man with very short, curly hair and round glasses, cleared his throat. “Well, I think it’s important first to remind everyone that Cain is still a suspect, she hasn’t been tried or found guilty—”

“Of course, of course.”

“—and that the Wilshire Boulevard accident was found not to be her fault. But with those … uh, caveats, you’d have to say that the failure to complete West Point and then the death of this child, those kinds of life events at a fairly young age, could have a potentially devastating effect.”

“Certainly.”

“You could potentially be looking at someone who’s saying, ‘I’ve tried hard, I’ve failed, what’s the use?’ I mean, particularly someone being the agent of a child’s death, and completely by accident, that’s someone who could be saying, ‘Society’s going to look at me like I’m some kind of monster no matter what, so I give up, I’m just going to be as bad as I can be.’ I’m not saying that’s what happened here, but it could be.”

“So you’re saying that this could be someone who just snapped.”

“That’s entirely possible.”

West Point and Wilshire Boulevard—they were the two turning points of my adult life, the two points that allowed these people who’d never met me to triangulate, to plot out my psyche like they were laying out a map.

“For God’s sake,” I told Serena, “the Eastman thing was obviously a planned-out, long-term crime, moving into an old lady’s house and embezzling her money. That’s not ‘snapping.’ ”

“They gotta make it interesting,” Serena said.

Finally the news shifted to an update about a missing woman in South Carolina. Serena muted the TV and turned her full attention to her food. I tried to do the same, but I wasn’t very hungry.

I went to bed early that night, to make up for the sleep I’d missed the night before, in St. Francis Wood with Joel. But instead I fell into that dark, dreamless, not-quite-asleep state for I don’t know how long, coming fully to consciousness at the sound of Serena shaking an Ambien out of the bottle I’d left at bedside.

Eventually I succumbed, dreaming that I was far from California and my troubles. Instead I was on an African beach, alone with CJ.

15

The next day we sighted Quentin Corelli, driving a dark sedan that he parked outside the Laska offices. I’d almost forgotten the way he moved, light on his feet and cocky. And I hadn’t expected the extent to which I bristled on seeing that, an almost literal hackles-of-the-neck feeling. Bastard, I thought, you haven’t changed.

“Asshole,” Serena said next to me, as though she saw as much to hate in him.

Around midday he left Laska’s offices, and we followed him, Serena at the wheel. We tailed him to the south part of San Francisco, near Candlestick Park. It was a mixed-use neighborhood, residential and light-industrial, where there was so little traffic on the streets that Serena dropped back for fear he’d make us. Then Quentin’s dark sedan turned left down