“Who?”
“Cinnamon.”
I took the ice pack off my ear. “When?”
“Four or five years ago.”
“You mean, like, you saw her ghost?”
Marie shook her head.
“But…she’s dead,” I said as if I were talking to certified lunatic. “Her mother…identified her body.”
Marie looked up at me. “I know. And I know I sound crazy, I probably am. But I saw her.”
“Or someone that looks like her,” I said. “Did you speak to her?”
“No. I didn’t—we didn’t speak.”
“Where was this?”
“At an antique store in Palm Springs. The whole thing—was maybe two minutes. As soon as she glanced my way, she made herself scarce. I don’t know if she was browsing or she worked there or what, I got nervous, turned away. When I turned back to see—she was gone.”
“Which antique store?”
“On Sunny Dunes, it’s like—there’s a whole mini-mall of ’em.”
“We came back the next day looking for her,” Lazerbeam said. “No dice.”
Marie was wet-faced now, dark streaks down her cheeks. “But it couldn’t have been her. How could it? Even if she was alive, she—no, it’s crazy. I was seeing things.”
Lazerbeam moved to the edge of the couch to comfort his wife, but I looked up at him and our eyes met.
He said, “It was her.”
With a shake of the head, I handed Marie back her frozen peas and walked out of the trailer without goodbyes.
I got in my car with the throb still fresh on my ear and sat there parked, stinging and annoyed, mouth wide open. I was turning into one of those Kewpie dolls people poke for thrills. I hadn’t worked a full shift or had a full night’s sleep in seven days, and suddenly Cinnamon Persky…was alive? But who knows what those two old kooks saw, some random lady in an antique shop. No. It was more psychedelia, more fantasia, wishful thinking—Emil is innocent, Cinnamon is alive, the past is the future, old is young.
Whereas I clung to the reality before me like someone losing their grip on a buoy. I shook my head, hit the ignition, and then it throttled me—like a go-kart engine. This was the funny vibe I was catching at Fountain Grove—from Gladstone, from Paulsen. This was what they wanted to snuff.
Cynthia Persky was alive. And they knew it.
That night at my sister-cousin Maya’s dining room table, I tried to share this half-baked vision, sounding a little high-strung—I felt high-strung, leaning across the dining room table in hushed tones. Maya and her husband, Marty, listened with their usual half-patience and skeptical frowns. In the next room, their eight-year-old daughter Stephanie watched Beat Bugs as I walked them through my search. I told them about the LP, Lazerbeam and his long-suffering wife, finding Hawley, all of it. I told them about the break-in and Hawley’s collage, Detective Gladstone and the trip to Fountain Grove. Recounting all this, my eyes kept drifting to the framed photo of Uncle Herschel over the blue denim family room couch—Herschel seated in a lawn chair at Maya’s wedding, her big, white-brimmed hat on his knee, bald, octogenarian Herschel, sagacious behind big glasses in a dark pin-striped suit, thick aqua tie, red rose boutonniere.
He’d put me on this search.
It was for him, because of him.
And it was right.
“They said they saw her, Maya. And I’m starting to believe them.”
“You have finally gone insane.”
“I know how it sounds. But lines are connecting—that detective who was on the case before me practically had a seizure when I mentioned her name. She was their manager, they were a band,” I repeated, tapping the table, “and they were all friends. Close friends.”
“So what?”
“So somebody murdered Reynaldo Durazo and framed Emil. And when Hawley figured it out? Pretty sure that someone shut him up too. And I don’t say that someone is Cinnamon Persky—but if she is alive, there’s a reason she’s hiding. And she’s the best line to the truth.”
“Adam,” Maya said, the way you’d speak to a child with a high fever, “there’s a death certificate. You yourself told me her mother identified her body.”
“I know, but—”
“No,” Maya said, getting up with finality, “this is a job for the police.”
I got up too, followed her to the kitchen. “The police don’t even think there’s a there there. They say Hawley was killed by a random thief.”
“Which he probably was.”
“Bullshit. Tell me, who robs someone and leaves behind a fifty-thousand-dollar video camera the size of a loaf of bread?”
Maya didn’t answer. In the background on the TV, four little bugs sang “Strawberry Fields Forever.” Nothing is real—
From the table, Marty said, “Why don’t ya tell him?”
“Tell me what?”
“Because it’s not relevant,” Maya blurted.
“What? Tell me.”
She sighed. “Nothing. Just—come on, I’ll show you.”
Marty stayed with Stephanie to watch the bug quartet as Maya led me up the carpeted stairs, then up a short staircase to the world’s cleanest attic.
“I was going over Daddy’s finances when the will was in probate,” she said, “and…I was really shocked. I knew he didn’t have much, but I didn’t think he had debt. You know how careful he was.”
“Hersch thought a pack of ten razors from the 99-cent store was a rip-off.”
“Well,” she said, kneeling to pop open the black trunk with gold trim, “toward the end, his medical expenses started really racking up. I never heard a word about it. I figured Kaiser covered the chemo, but Daddy also took a trip to Texas to be diagnosed by some superspecialist. Kaiser didn’t cover that and the bill was insane, like thirty grand, not including airfare and hotel.”
“And we never heard about any of this?”
Maya scoffed. “You never heard about anything; you were off in la-la land trying to be the Jewish Stevie Wonder.”
I joined her on my knees as she started digging through the last of Uncle Herschel’s worldly possessions. It was all there—the life of a man, or what was left of it. His old trumpet case, his Real Book sheet music binder, a little framed baseball card—Duke Snider outfield Brooklyn Dodgers, two commemorative plates—Annie and Gone with the Wind, a stack of tax return folders dated by year, his engraved retirement clock from the DWP, some old letters and postcards, and a worn paperback copy of the King James Bible with the New Testament ripped out. He really was a funny guy in his way—almost too sentimental, yet oppositional to the core. The sight of a diary made my heart thump. I picked it up.
