Page 27 of Hero

He could tell she was disconcerted and mildly annoyed, but he had already thought through this. He had offered repeatedly to drive her wherever she wanted and she had refused. She wanted to be at his place. What he was doing would give her at least two hours to be irritated and then realize he was doing her a favor—two hours when she didn’t have to talk with him and risk making mistakes while she tried to keep her story straight, and more important, two hours when the enemies she was hiding from could look for her all they wanted and get nowhere.

Alston pulled the car over in a shady spot beneath a row of California sycamore trees with smooth light gray bark and used his phone to look up Justine Poole’s address. There it was, available to anyone. His first thought was that it was no wonder she was behaving oddly. Somebody had just murdered her boss. If there were people connected with the robbery who would kill him for revenge, why not her too?

Alston put her address in his navigation app and let the robotic woman’s voice give him the GPS’s chosen route to the place. If he was going to write her story it should be her whole story. He was fairly sure he was not going to learn much about her at her place, because she was staying away from home, but if he didn’t, at least he could get some pictures toshow one of the three skeptical editors he was considering that he had gone after the story like a pro.

At that moment Justine Poole was looking at a collection of the pictures Joe Alston had already taken. She had found the yellow sticky note he had stuck to the back page of his desk calendar with his password on it. He obviously changed his passwords frequently and protected his story files with their own passwords. She’d thought he was probably that sort of person. Like all great ideas, having dozens of passwords had a built-in flaw, which was that he had to write them down.

She had found what he’d been writing all morning. It was about her. She could hardly believe it. He had shown no hint that he had recognized her at the coffee shop. Had he looked inside her purse when she’d dozed off and found her driver’s license or something? Everybody’s purse had about ten plastic cards with their name embossed on them. How had she been so careless? She was angry with him, and then with herself for wasting time thinking about it. It didn’t matter how he knew. He’d found out. He knew.

She read the notes he had typed. “She saw me in the coffee shop in Studio City and, for reasons of her own, decided to use me as her decoy [need better word], allowing her to slip out, but reassure the person she was eluding that she hadn’t gone anywhere. She came to my table, put her drink down and left her jacket with me while she used the restroom. A few minutes later she called the cell phone in the jacket pocket from a second phone she had with her to tell me she’d gone out the back window.

“When I met her outside, she had seemingly acquired some kind of Eastern European accent, openly declared she had selected me basedon my potential as a dating partner, and asked me to take her home to avoid a male acquaintance she had spotted nearby. It turned out she didn’t mean her house, but my house. She struck me as a mixture of shrewd premeditation and insanity.”

Justine jumped from that part to the next and then found a file that held cell phone photographs of her. There were a few taken while she was asleep, a few taken while she was reading articles on her own phone, some taken while she had been walking around in the guesthouse, and some taken through the living room windows while she was in the garden reading. There were several that made her reluctantly admit that he had talent for photography. The natural light from the windows and skylights on her face and hair seemed to have been composed rather than noticed. He had also not neglected her body, which in her opinion was barely average and certainly nothing special in Los Angeles, but men were men at all times and in every situation.

He’d written in the same file, “Her appearance is the most obvious reason she has been in demand in her work. She can go unnoticed among the rich and privileged. An observer might assume she was an actress he couldn’t quite place, but clearly somebody who belonged there. If she was not next season’s celebrity, then maybe a girlfriend or daughter of an important insider.”

Justine couldn’t help feeling slightly less angry at him after reading those notes. They also gave her a better idea of what he had been thinking and feeling, and maybe she could find a way to use that to her advantage.

She looked at the time in the upper right corner of his laptop’s screen and then closed the files. She didn’t want the history of when they’d last been open to be too long after he had left.

She also wanted to use the time before he came back to search for things that would help her stay alive. The next priority was to search for a gun.

Joe Alston drove toward the address he had found for Justine Poole. He was not quite sure what he was likely to be stepping into, so he took some precautions. He looked at the phone navigation app map a step before the destination, ended the robot instructions, parked a block from the address, and proceeded on foot.

The neighborhood was like many on the west side, full of little houses with white stucco walls and red tile roofs with old-LA details like doors and windows with rounded tops or late Craftsman–style places with porches and wooden beams. The trees on the lawns and parkways were big and the electrical wires threaded through them about midway up. He had the pessimistic feeling that they were soon to be torn down and the replacements then sold at high prices to buyers who should have been smart enough to see that they were losing vanished craftsmanship and irreplaceable materials and getting giant barns built fast and cheap.

Justine’s condominium building was another phenomenon, built right where the R-1 zoning stopped. It wasn’t bad. The facing was brick with horizontal strips of reinforced concrete at each floor and balconies on the second and third. There was an underground garage beneath the building with an iron gate across its opening.

When he came closer to the corner, he could see three news vans parked on the street near the front entrance with their transmission masts in the air and about twenty people on the sidewalks and driveway walking back and forth in front of the television cameras carrying signs. The first sign he could make out said, “Mourn for Darryl and Kyle.” The next had the word “Justine” in a red circle crossed out and “Justice!” below it. The third just said, “Killer!” Alston took out his phone and recorded a video of the scene, then ventured closer.

There was a middle-aged man in a light gray summer suit standing close to a newswoman Joe recognized, the tall, skinny blond one they usually sent out to report floods and fires. The man was telling her, “It’s been almost seventy-two hours since Darryl and his friend Kyle were shot to death by the woman who lives in this building. That is not in question, and it’s the only thing about this incident that isn’t. Justine Poole was working as a private bodyguard, a person whose right to discharge a firearm in any circumstance is extremely limited. She was not part of law enforcement sworn to serve and protect. She was a civilian employee of a very expensive service paid to stand between the very rich and the common people.”

“And whom do you represent, Mr. Waltham?”

“I represent the family of Darryl Stimson,” he said, “one of the two young men who were shot down in cold blood near the gate of Miss Poole’s clients. The parents of Kyle Davis have their own attorney. If this shooting had been done by a police officer, there would already be at least an internal investigation. Why isn’t there one this time? What are the police chief and the district attorney waiting for?”

The newswoman said, “The police department has said the incident is being investigated.”

Waltham smirked. “We’ll believe that when there’s evidence of it. So far, the parents have not been contacted. And the only three surviving witnesses to the shooting, the other young men present, all say she opened fire on them in an ambush.”

“Thank you, Mr. Waltham,” the reporter said. She looked into the camera and said, “This is Nancy Faye Kirschner, live at the home of Justine Poole. Back to you, Kate.”

Joe Alston knew instantly that he was seeing something crucial to his story. He reached for his phone again and realized it had still beenrecording in video mode from his shirt pocket. He kept it there and walked in the direction of another set of protesters and newspeople. There was another lawyer with this reporter, and he seemed to be making the same sort of protest. Alston heard him say, “I think the people of this city have become sick and tired of the incredible gap between rich and poor that we see on display every day. We haven’t been able to do anything about the huge disparity, just learned to tolerate the different lives the rich live here—private schools for their children, restaurants and clubs so exclusive there are no signs on the buildings, huge houses on acres of land hidden behind high hedges and walls when there aren’t enough parks for our kids to play in, private jets on special airstrips polluting our air with thirty-mile flights. But the people are not going to put up with the rich being allowed to hire private assassins empowered to shoot to kill on their own say-so.”

Joe Alston kept walking at a leisurely pace, listening and recording as he went. The newspeople had their reports pretty quickly and began to pack up, return to their vans, and pull away. The demonstrators continued until all the cameras were gone, then the two lawyers called them into a circle and said something to them, which seemed to be a dismissal. A moment later they dispersed and walked off to get into cars.

Alston turned at the first corner so he could go around the long block to get to his car. He didn’t want to become a familiar face to the demonstrators, since they were a faction who might play a big part in later phases of his story. He might need to approach them in the future under circumstances that made them essential and appearing to spy on them now would not make them want to talk to him.

When he got to his car, he looked at the clock on the dashboard and realized that it was later than he had thought. In a couple of hours itwould be time for dinner and he had nothing in his refrigerator that he could make into a meal to serve to a guest. He was not going to have much chance of keeping Justine Poole around if he didn’t feed her, and he was positive she would refuse to go to a restaurant, where she might be recognized. He drove to his favorite Szechuan restaurant, placed a take-out order that consisted of six different dishes—one containing beef, one chicken, one shrimp, one scallops, and two vegetarian—and waited for it to be packed up while he thought about Justine.

There was no question that most of the city was thinking of her as the hero she had been made out to be, but public opinion came from news sources and news media needed something new to feed the customers every day. Now that Justine was a hero, people calling her a murderer would be a delicious new story. That was how the ritual destruction usually began. He picked up the bags containing the food order and got them into the trunk of his car, keeping them upright by putting them inside an empty cardboard box he hadn’t remembered he had, and then he drove home. He parked in the garage and carried the box of take-out bags to the guesthouse.

20

Joe felt a growing tension as he stepped inside the guesthouse, not sure whether he had already caused Justine Poole to leave, losing his exclusive story. His departure had been intentionally casual and indifferent to keep the relationship friendly rather than romantic. As soon as he had learned who she was, he had known her interest in him was only an act to make him want to keep her around, and he wanted to take the pressure off. The fact that she was trying to make herself safe from whoever had killed Benjamin Spengler was hard to resent. He hoped he hadn’t been too indifferent.

All she undoubtedly wanted was for him not to find her annoying or troublesome enough to throw her out. At least for the moment, that suited him too. Had he made a mistake? He heard the noise of his hair dryer coming from the bathroom. He was relieved. She was still here.

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