Page 20 of Hero

She buckled her seat belt and let herself scan the cars and the people walking on the sidewalk outside the baggage claims of the terminals. She didn’t see the man or his car, and she felt her heart beginning to slow and her muscles relax. The cab’s backseat side windows were tinted, so it was unlikely that anyone outside could even see her face. The cab pulled onto Sepulveda and took the entrance to the 405 freeway.

The northbound freeway this morning was a sluggish stream as tens of thousands of cars competed for an extra car-length of progress while the pavement narrowed and shed lanes to pass through the central part of the city. As time went by, Justine’s one-sided conversation began to run thin without the young woman contributing more than grunts and nods and the occasional half-hearted chuckles, and eventually it died.When the cab reached the young woman’s address, it was a vast green space with a huge brick house on it. The young woman got out, accepted her suitcase, and walked into the house without saying anything. As the young woman disappeared, it occurred to Justine that neither of them had remembered that she’d offered the young woman fifty dollars plus the cab ride.

The driver said, “Okay. Now for Studio City.”

Justine thought of asking him to wait while she ran to the front door with the fifty dollars, but she realized that maybe the girl had felt uncomfortable accepting fifty bucks in front of her parents’ eight-million-dollar house. She hesitated, and the driver pulled away.

The drive back along the freeway seemed faster to Justine, and as the cab came closer to the destination, she began to dread the end. She’d had no plan except to get out of immediate danger. She seemed to have slipped the noose, but now she needed to make a plan that would last more than a few minutes. She had not proven to herself yet how the man had found her hotel, but the most likely way she knew of was to pay a company that had access to credit card purchases. Everything that had happened in the past couple of days had seemed to come from some unexpected place, some other reality, but she had to react to what she saw and heard, not what she’d expected. Using the credit card that she’d used to pay for the hotel was now a risk. Any card in the name Justine Poole would be a risk.

While the cab veered onto the exit ramp at Laurel Canyon and kept going south for the next two blocks, she looked at the meter. The ride was going to be over a hundred dollars without the tip, and she didn’t have enough cash with her. She had stopped carrying much money during the pandemic, when clerks became reluctant to touch anything that had been passed around from one person to another. She openedher purse, felt for the secret pocket opening and took out the Visa card that said “Anna S. Kepka.”

The corner of Ventura Boulevard and Laurel Canyon was too busy for a cab to stop and let a customer off, so the driver pulled forward fifty feet into the entrance to the free parking lot behind a row of stores beside the CVS pharmacy. She paid with her Anna Kepka credit card, got out of the cab, and stood still for a few seconds fiddling with her purse by the open door while she scanned for any sign that they’d been followed by the BMW. There was no sign of it, so she said, “Thanks,” closed the door, and hurried into the pharmacy.

She walked through the pharmacy and out to Ventura Boulevard. There was a lot of traffic going east and west on the street, and the broad sidewalks held a steady stream of people walking among the stores, restaurants, and banks. Ventura Boulevard was essentially the main street of the San Fernando Valley.

She’d had a few long-term assignments during her time at Spengler-Nash, and one was running interference for Melisandre LeVos, a young Canadian singer who lived nearby and liked to stop at a coffee shop near here. Justine had enjoyed some parts of the assignment—being awake in the sunlit hours, staying on one assignment for more than a night at a time, working with a client her own age. She had been able to relax a bit during rehearsals and taping sessions, where studio security departments were already providing most of the protection. She began to look for the coffee shop.

She walked west at a quick pace, past the art deco Studio City Theater, which had been converted to a giant bookstore long before she’d ever seen it, then past an antique furniture store and a hairdresser’s salon. She wanted to get indoors, to a place where she could be safely off the street while she figured out what to do next. Finally,she recognized the coffee shop she used to go to with Melisandre. She stepped inside and joined the short line of people waiting to order. The line moved quickly, and she ordered and paid in cash for an iced black tea and a muffin and gave the name Terry for it. Terry was called in about two minutes and she picked up her order, went to the end of the counter, and added the cream her grandmother had always put in the tea but omitted the sugar. She sat at a small table near the back of the shop so she wouldn’t be easy to see from the street.

As she nibbled at the muffin and sipped the tea, she thought about how the killer had found her. The fact that her name had been released so quickly was a by-product of reporters’ eagerness rather than an intent to endanger her. Her name had led him to her address, and her photograph came to him courtesy of Ally Grosvenor via Channel 7 news. He had broken into the Grosvenors’ apartment and hers. That must have given him access to her credit card number—maybe all of her Justine card numbers.

She studied the other people in the coffee shop. There was nobody who seemed even remotely threatening. She’d had a difficult morning, but for the moment she was in a calm, sheltered place, and she had apparently bought some time. The people around her definitely didn’t include the man who had come for her in the BMW. Most of them were young and sitting with other people. She liked the fact that about half were female, because the kinds of erratic behavior that were dangerous were almost exclusively male.

She had become expert at these assessments and it had helped her steer her clients away from trouble. Her gaze drifted upward over the heads of the coffee drinkers and caught an image that made her breath stop and her lungs stay inflated for two seconds. It looked like thesame black BMW, sitting at the traffic light outside. She watched it nose into the intersection and turn right. As it did, the car showed its left side to the coffee shop window, and she saw the face of the driver. It was the killer’s face. He was scanning the side street for parking spaces.

15

Joe Alston glanced over the rim of his cup at the woman who had just taken the table in the back of the shop. He had noticed her because she was attractive, about the right age—maybe five years older than the youngest group in the shop—and alone. He realized he would have sounded like a stalker to a person who could read his mind, but he was just looking and wondering. Her long, thick, dark brown hair made him want her to brush it aside with her hand so he could see her face better. She was drinking something in a transparent plastic cup through a straw, probably iced coffee.

Alston allowed himself one look and then turned away toward the big front window, where he watched the activity on the busy corner. There were crosswalks and a traffic signal, so some cars were gliding past while others were waiting to go the other way, as were a few pedestrians. He kept the lid on his coffee and sipped through the little hole on top because once the lid was removed, the paper cup couldn’t be trusted to remain rigid. He watched the people going past and wondered about each of them—who they were and why they weren’t at work somewhere. Inthis part of Los Angeles, looking at people was irresistible and hypnotic. There were always so many of them out, and they were all moving, and anyone could be anything.

He was good at remembering faces, but not at remembering the context. If he saw one that looked familiar, he might have seen it at a movie theater or on a movie screen or both. To complicate this kind of people-watching, he could walk a block and see the CBS Radford lot. Universal Studios was within half a mile, and a ten-minute drive past that were Warner Brothers, Disney, and several music studios.

He subscribed to the theory that in the past century, the best-looking young people born in the benighted, hopeless, and sunless places east of the Mississippi had come here, drawn by the belief that regular features, abundant hair, and a faultless complexion could make them rich. Even when that magic didn’t happen, other magic did and they married and produced offspring like the people on Ventura Boulevard.

Joe Alston had been born in Upstate New York and educated in Connecticut and drifted here like the rest. Although he was in good shape, six feet tall with reasonably pleasant features and a full head of light brown hair, he had never been tempted by the entertainment business. He had been hired by eastern newspapers as a reporter and then a feature and opinion writer. After he’d made a respectable name for himself, he turned to freelance writing, mostly for magazines. He’d come to Los Angeles one February tracking a story about dark web profiteers and decided it would be insane not to make LA his home base.

He’d incorporated his business in California and the way he found out about jobs was his phone. Early morning was the time for communication from London, New York, and Boston, and from ten on, Chicago, and then Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Seattle. He took out his phone to look at his email.

He felt a shadow move over him and looked up. It was that woman, standing beside him. She seemed to be looking at his phone screen, an act that was unthinkable, but he hadn’t actually caught her, so he simply set the phone face down and looked up into her eyes, his eyebrows raised.

She said, “Hi. Are you, like, honest?”

“Like honest?” he said. “No. I’m actually honest.”

She set her drink on his table and said, “I thought so. Please watch my jacket.” She slung it onto his lap by the collar, then walked to the teak door of the ladies’ restroom to the left of the counter, opened the door, and went in.

He looked after her in astonishment and then was distracted by his surprise that she could walk right into a restroom during a busy time like this. Usually there were women in line waiting for a turn. She was obviously one of those people who was lucky in small things.

He picked up his phone from the table and returned to the business of scrolling down the entries on the screen looking for work. He kept the jacket on his lap and pulled his chair closer to the table so his solar plexus was touching it and the jacket couldn’t be easily snatched and wasn’t sitting on the table getting stained by old spills or the condensation from her cold drink.

One of the emails he had been hoping for was there. It was a note from a magazine editor to let him know he had been paid electronically for a long article. This was good, because it had only been printed a week ago. Usually, magazine editors talked as though the accounting office was located on the far side of a mountain range that could only be crossed on a narrow footpath above a chasm. Once there, the editor had to persuade an argumentative legislative body to discuss the payment until they had unanimously agreed to it and then make the trip backwith the money. Alston did a quick check on his mobile banking app to verify the deposit and then wrote back, “Thank you, Donald. It’s been a pleasure. Best, Joe.” SEND.

He looked at other emails while he waited for the woman to come back for her jacket. A reader had liked an article. “I’m pleased that you liked it. Thanks for taking the time to let me know. Joseph Alston.” SEND. Someone believed she had found a mistake in another article. She was wrong, but he wrote, “Thank you for giving the article such a close reading. It’s good to know somebody is paying attention.” He decided he couldn’t let the misunderstanding stand. “I think you’ll find that in the third section, though, I share my reasons for suspecting that Mr. Harrow’s ‘informed source’ is Colonel Maijiti himself, and not an outside supporter. We know the mysterious memo originated from the colonel’s IP address and was sent to one of his cousins, then to Mr. Harrow.” SEND.

Joe Alston sipped his coffee, found that it had cooled enough to drink, and looked at the time on the upper right corner of his phone screen. He wished he had looked at it when she had gone into the restroom. It could have been seven or eight minutes and only seemed longer. He felt stupid. Timing someone when they were in the restroom was an infringement of their privacy and a useless waste of his consciousness.

Still, his discomfort was increasing. He had never seen her before. A suspicion was forming that he was being fooled somehow. He lifted his eyes and surveyed the coffee shop. The people looked like the same segment of the population that had filled the place since he had first seen it a few years ago—nearly all in their twenties or early thirties, most of them fit and attractive in the seemingly effortless way that such people were. None of the others seemed to be aware of him. He knew he couldn’t trust that impression because being fully involved with one’scompanions or with one’s own phone was the norm, but he welcomed their inattention right now.

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