The Rain Don't Wash It Clean

It was raining in Los Angeles, which meant the world was ending or close to it. I sat at the kitchen table with a glass of bourbon and a cigarette and listened to the water hammer against the window. The kids were in the living room. I could hear them—the shuffle of feet, the low murmur of voices, the occasional crash of something hitting the floor.

I didn't get up. I finished my bourbon. I lit another cigarette.

My name is Marcus Wayne. I was thirty-eight years old. I had been a soldier. Now I was a private investigator with no clients, a hard-on for whiskey, and two kids in my apartment who weren't even mine.

Billy was my brother's boy. His mother—my sister-in-law, God rest her—had died of pneumonia in January, and there was no one else, so there was me. Little Catherine was my niece, living with us until her mother got back on her feet, which at this rate would be never.

The buzzer rang. I let it buzz twice before I got up.

It was Vicki Lawson. Eight years old, dark hair, dark eyes, the kind of kid who watched too closely and said too little. Her mother worked the late shift at the diner on Pico. Sometimes Vicki came upstairs to play with Billy. Sometimes I wished she wouldn't.

"Your mother working tonight?" I said.

She nodded.

"Come in."

She went to the living room. Within five minutes, the three of them were running through the apartment like it was a war zone. I sat back down at the kitchen table. I poured another bourbon.

Then I heard the silence.

Not the absence of noise—the specific quality of it. The silence of children who are trying very hard to be quiet. The silence of something happening that shouldn't.

I got up. I walked to the living room.

It was empty. The TV was on. The front door was open.

I stood in the doorway for a long moment, looking at the empty apartment, at the rain streaming down the windows, at the hallway beyond. Then I went after them.

They couldn't have gone far. Third floor. No elevator. I checked the stairwell, the hallway, the other apartments. Nothing. I went down to the second floor. The first floor. The basement. The parking garage.

Nothing.

I came back up. I searched the apartment—every closet, every drawer, every space where a kid could fit. Nothing. I searched it twice. I searched it three times.

The buzzer rang.

I went to the intercom. "Yeah."

"Mr. Wayne." It was Mr. Lawson. Vicki's father. A thin man, an accountant, the kind of guy who wore pressed shirts and worried about the stock market. "Is Vicki there?"

I looked at the empty apartment. I looked at the open front door. I looked at my reflection in the window—rain, darkness, a man who had made a lot of mistakes and was about to make another one.

"She's here," I said. "Hold on."

I buzzed him up. He came into the apartment and stood in the doorway, rain dripping from his hat, looking at me with those pale eyes.

"Where is she?"

I told him. The running. The silence. The search. The nothing.

He listened. He didn't move. He didn't say anything.

Then he reached into his coat and pulled out a photograph. A woman. Young. Pretty. The kind of woman who worked late shifts at diners and still smiled for the camera.

"That's Vicki's mother," he said. "My wife. She's been dead for three years."

I looked at the photograph. I looked at him.

"She left me," he said. "She took Vicki. She moved to San Francisco. She worked at that diner to pay the bills. And three weeks ago, she came back. She said she wanted to try again. She said she was sorry."

He put the photograph back in his coat. He looked at me.

"The bank robbery last month," he said. "The one on Wilshire. You heard about it?"

I had. Two men, masks, guns. They got away with eighty thousand dollars. One of them shot a security guard. Nobody knew who they were.

"That was my wife," he said. "That was my wife and the man she's been living with. And Vicki was there. Vicki saw it all. And now my wife is gone, and the man is in the wind, and Vicki knows too much."

I poured myself another bourbon. I offered him one. He shook his head.

"I think your daughter ran away," I said. "I think she saw something she shouldn't have, and she's scared, and she went somewhere she thought was safe."

"Where?"

I looked at him. I looked at the rain.

"I don't know," I said. "But if I were eight years old and I'd seen what she'd seen, I wouldn't go far. I'd go somewhere I knew. Somewhere close. Somewhere I thought nobody would look."

He looked at me. I looked at him.

"There's an empty apartment on the second floor," I said. "The one with the red door. They've been renovating it for six months and they never finish. What if she went there?"

We went together. Down the stairs, through the rain, to the red door. It was locked. I didn't have a key. I didn't need one.

The door opened. We went inside. The apartment was dark, full of dust and the smell of fresh paint. Rain came through the window. Lightning flashed.

In the corner, behind a stack of Sheetrock, a small figure huddled. Dark hair. Dark eyes. She looked up at us.

"Daddy," Vicki said.

I stepped back. I let him go to her. I walked back up to my apartment, poured another bourbon, and watched the rain fall.

Some cases you solve. Some cases solve themselves. Some cases you don't want to know the answer to.

This was the last kind.

I finished my bourbon. I lit another cigarette. Outside, the rain kept falling, and I knew it wouldn't wash anything clean—not the guilt, not the truth, not the things we'd all seen and couldn't forget.

The rain in Los Angeles never washes anything clean. It just makes everything harder to see. --- OTMES: OTMES-v2-3D2654-163-M6-240-362I100-3FD6