An Inconvenient Woman

by An Inconvenient Woman (retail) (epub)

  She pretended he was a friend.

  He wore a white suit and a large white hat, both of which gave him a theatrical air. I heard her call him Harry. Just Harry. She never said his last name.

  They’d chatted for a while. Very discreetly. No holding hands, and certainly no kissing. And yet I’d sensed an intimacy between them, as if they were sharing secrets. I’d been too young to make out a lover when I saw one, but in later years I’d come to realize that that is what this Harry must have been to my mother.

  Even a few minutes after lunch, when I was in my office, I kept thinking about the shadowy bedroom with my father’s body. I knew I had to shake myself out this mood and get back to normal, but my recent grief and heartbreak still had their teeth sunk very deeply into me, and they were holding on. Each time I tried to raise my spirits—laugh at a joke or make one of my own—I felt them drag me down.

  It’s dangerous to feel that in some part of your life, the rug’s been pulled out from under you. I didn’t want to feel that way, but I did.

  I knew it was temporary, however. Like everything else, I’d get over losing my father, and life would seem good to me again. Soon, I told myself, everything will get back its shine.

  2.

  I was at my desk later that afternoon when Maurice Walker arrived. He was dressed in a blue pinstripe suit. He was of medium height, with gray hair. He’d brought with him another man who looked to be in his midforties, trim and athletic, the type who regularly hits the gym. They went directly into Jake’s office.

  I knew the routine. Jake would ask the usual questions. He’d want to know who might have had a motive to kill Walker’s wife. Revenge would be explored. A disgruntled associate? A business deal gone bad? Could drugs have been involved? Did Mrs. Walker have a life insurance policy? From there, Jake would ask about the state of their marital relations. Whether things were fine between Walker and his wife, and if not, did either have a lover?

  They emerged from Jake’s office just over an hour later. I was standing by the water cooler as all three of them made their way to the elevator.

  Just to be polite, Jake introduced me, though almost comically. “Sloan here is a sin eater,” he said.

  Walker just nodded, but the other man looked at me curiously.

  “What’s a sin eater?” he asked.

  Because I’d dealt with that question before, I had a ready answer for it, one I’d adapted to Los Angeles by using a Movietown reference.

  “Did you ever see Pulp Fiction?” I asked.

  “Of course. It’s one of my favorites. I’ve seen it three or four times.”

  “Then you’ll remember a scene where two bunglers kill a man in the back of a car,” I said. “They have to have the whole thing cleaned up. To get it done, they call a guy who specializes in, well, making things go away.”

  The man smiled knowingly. “Ah, yes. He comes and fixes the situation. Wipes up the blood. The fingerprints. Everything.”

  “In a way, that’s what I do,” I said. “Only without the blood, and I don’t get involved with murders.”

  I offered my friendly sin-eater smile.

  “I’m more of a gentle persuader,” I added.

  “And if that doesn’t work?” the man asked.

  On cue, my smile vanished and I showed him my hard side. “At that point I’d go to Plan B.”

  He seemed to appreciate my profession, and looked at me almost admiringly.

  “A woman who makes bad things go away,” he said with a smile. “Very interesting.”

  He thrust out his hand.

  “Simon Miller,” he told me. “Pleased to meet you.”

  I shook his hand.

  The elevator opened.

  Miller started to get into it but stopped and turned to face me.

  “Was your father Monroe Wilson?” he asked.

  “Yes, he was. How did you know?”

  “As I passed your office, I noticed his picture on the table behind your desk.” He smiled. “My father sat on the county commission. He often spoke of your father. About what a good cop he was. He thought he had a great career ahead of him. Then your father suddenly retired, right?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “So how’s he doing, your dad?”

  “He died. A month ago.”

  I recalled the day of his burial, how few people had attended the graveside ceremony. Mostly old men from the LAPD, at rest with their plaques and their pensions. After the final prayer they’d trailed down to their waiting cars, leaving me alone with my love for him.

  “I’m very sorry,” Miller said. “My dad died three years ago. It’s a tough moment.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  “I really am very sorry,” he repeated.

  I could see that something was threading through his mind. He didn’t tell me what it was, and I didn’t ask.

  “Well, goodbye,” he said.

  “Goodbye.”

  I thought that would be the end of it, but he called an hour later.

  “I need a sin eater,” he said. “Not that I have any sins to eat. But I do have a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “I’d rather show you.” He gave me his address, said it was urgent. He wanted to know if I could come to his house right away.

  I told him I’d drop by later in the afternoon.

  Which I did.

  He lived in a large house in Beverly Hills. Spanish style, with a red tile roof. There was a BMW in the driveway as well as a Bentley.

  I had to wait at the door only a couple of seconds after ringing the bell.

  “Welcome,” he said.

  He’d shed the jacket and tie and was now dressed in a white shirt and black trousers.

  “I’ve done a little research on you,” he said as he escorted me into a room just off the foyer. “You were with the LAPD for ten years. Made it up to Homicide Division in record time. Youngest ever. Then you left the department. Why?”

  There’d been many reasons. I’d never been particularly good at department politics. The higher I rose, the more I had to watch my back. I saw too much neglect of duty, too much waste of money, too much indulgence of incompetence, especially as a result of cronyism. In addition, the paperwork grew each year, as did the time required to sit at a desk and fill out the necessary forms. I liked being on the street. Unfortunately, I was as office-bound as a bank clerk.

  But it wasn’t just a question of problems in the department itself.

  The whole system was disillusioning. Good cases were blown by lazy prosecutions. Judges threw out vital evidence. The revolving door kept revolving, and with each turn more bad people were set free to do bad things. As for dispensing justice, that mostly happened in the movies.

  In the end I’d talked it all over with my father. His only comment had been a rather melancholy, “Then it’s time to leave. Because if you stay, you’ll end up a bad cop.”

  It was this response that had finally sent me running for the exit. The fear that if I remained in the LAPD, I would fail to be the kind of cop my father had been.

  I didn’t want to discuss any of this with Miller, however, so I plucked another reason from the list.

  “I guess I just got tired of never being able to stop a murder before it happened,” I answered. “In homicide, you’re always one step behind a killer. And when the victim is a woman or a child, it can feel sort of . . . useless.”

  “But when you catch a killer, that brings a little closure, doesn’t it?”

  “It does for some people. It didn’t for me.”

  Miller smiled. “Interesting.”

  We talked a few minutes longer before Miller got down to business.

  “I have a problem with my ex-wife. She has a history of mental instability. Rather than go into the details, I’d like to show you something.”

  With that, he directed me down a long corridor.

  “This is an old movie-era house,” he said. “It has a screening room.”
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  There were statues and paintings of little angels playing on harps. Even the small ones were in huge wooden frames with elaborate carvings.

  At the end of the hall he guided me into a curtained room. There were two rows of movie seats. Red. Cushioned.

  “Have a seat.”

  I did.

  A large flat-screen television was mounted to the wall. The usual audiovisual equipment rested in a cabinet just below it. Miller placed a DVD in the player, picked up the remote control, and took the seat next to me.

  “I had a technician put this together,” Miller said. “He knows all about audiovisual equipment. You can tell it’s spliced, of course. We had to do that because it’s shot from three different angles. One camera is trained on the front driveway. The other is on the house. The third one is from high above. It takes in both the driveway and the house.”

  “You have a lot of security cameras.”

  “When you see this, you’ll know why I had them installed.”

  He looked at me sadly.

  “Honestly, since this happened, I feel like I’ve been living under siege.”

  He tapped a button on the remote, and the black screen flickered to life.

  I watched as a white PT Cruiser circled the driveway, then came to a halt in front of Simon’s house. A blond woman is sitting behind the wheel. She bows her head. She looks like she’s hesitating, or perhaps doesn’t quite know what to do next. It’s as if she’s standing on a bridge, staring down at the water, deciding if she really has to jump. She remains this way for about fifteen seconds. During that time she hardly moves. You can feel things churning inside her. She is considering the consequences one last time. I’d seen that expression before. A kid with a gun, figuring out if he truly wants to shoot a cop, take it that far, change his life that much for the worse.

  The kid usually puts down the gun.

  The woman made a different choice.

  She gets out of the car. Her hair is long and straight, and she is very thin. She moves slowly. There is a sense of physical weakness, of her being in bad health. A woman who isn’t eating enough or getting enough sleep. When she raises the rear door of the Cruiser, it almost seems too heavy for her. She uses both arms to raise it. Then she stops again. Her arms dangle at her sides. Given all that, it’s hard for me to imagine that she doesn’t just close the door, pull herself back behind the wheel, and drive away. It would be so much easier to do that.

  But that’s not what she does.

  She takes out a can of paint, opens it, and walks over to a dark blue Lexus. With a broad brush, she scrawls the words CHILD MOLESTER across the entire driver’s side of the car in blood-red paint.

  I looked over at Miller. He was staring expressionlessly at the screen. I couldn’t tell whether he was hiding his feelings for this woman or simply didn’t have any left to offer her. He was calm, steady. It was as if he’d gotten used to her being crazy, to being attacked by her.

  I turned back to the screen.

  The woman has finished her work on the Lexus. She steps back and looks at the words she’s written. Then she moves to the front door of the house and angrily, sloppily writes the same words: CHILD MOLESTER.

  The video moves to another camera. A police cruiser pulls into the driveway and two uniformed officers get out. The woman turns to face them. She stands and waits as the two officers approach. One of them puts her hand on her pistol. I recognize her as Candace Marks. We’d been rookies together, but she’d later gone on to get a degree in criminal justice and now worked in the Internal Affairs Department, reaching for a pencil instead of a gun.

  Candace does all the talking. Her male partner just watches as she steps toward the woman, raises her hand, then brings it down in a slow, fluid motion. She is instructing the woman to put down the paint and the brush.

  The woman doesn’t do it.

  Candace stops going toward her.

  They stare at each other.

  Finally the woman speaks. There is no way of knowing what she says, but I can see that it puts Candace on alert. Her eyes get more intense. She glances at her partner. I have seen that signal. It means, We’ve got real trouble here.

  “This is the hard part to watch,” Simon said. “It hurts me to see it.”

  I don’t look at him. Part of me is no longer even in his house, sitting in a dark room, watching a television screen.

  I am outside now.

  With the woman.

  She watches the two police officers as they approach. Candace is in the lead, a few paces in front of the second officer. She is trying to talk her down. Motioning for her to let go of the paint can, the brush. The woman holds on to them. She is very still.

  The second officer steps to the right. The woman’s head jerks toward him. She sees the maneuver for what it is, an effort to surround her. She flings the can toward Candace. A wave of red paint sloshes out of the can as it hurtles through the air.

  Technically, this is assault.

  I know what will happen next.

  The police rush forward and bring her first to her knees, then facedown on the stone driveway. She resists, kicks, struggles. Candace straddles her, brings her right and left wrists together, and cuffs her.

  Miller comes out. He looks relieved that the incident is over. The police lift her from the ground and lead her to their car. Candace places her hand on top of the woman’s head as she lowers her into the back seat.

  Miller shakes hands with Candace and her partner. He is obviously thanking them.

  Once they’ve gone, he turns and goes inside.

  At this point the screen goes black.

  “That was five years ago,” Miller said.

  He got to his feet, walked over to the TV.

  “The woman is my ex-wife,” he told me. “Her name is Claire Fontaine.”

  “Where’d she get that idea about you?” I asked him. “That you’re a child molester?”

  “It had to do with her daughter from a previous marriage. Melody. She drowned one night near Catalina. Later Claire became convinced that I’d molested her.”

  I had no way of judging any of this, but that wasn’t important. You give your clients the benefit of the doubt and do all you can to help them.

  Even so, I pursued the issue for one additional step.

  “This idea about you came out of the blue?” I asked.

  “Out of the blue.”

  “No one else has ever accused you of this?”

  Miller looked offended. “Absolutely not. And by the way, I’m not the only man she’s accused of terrible things. Her own father, as a matter of fact. According to Claire, when she was eight years old, her father tried to drown her.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “He fell in love with a woman who didn’t want any kids around. So he took Claire swimming and at some point tried to drown her. Claire says he grabbed her ankles when she was trying to climb out of the water onto a boat, tried to pull her underwater. He would have succeeded if some other people hadn’t shown up. After that her father lost the woman, and for that reason he never stopped hating Claire.”

  He released an exasperated sigh.

  “She never had any evidence of that story, either,” he added.

  He shook his head.

  “But once Claire has something in her mind, evidence doesn’t matter. It’s the same with me and her child-molestation accusation.”

  “But that was five years ago,” I reminded him. “What’s the problem with her now?”

  “She’s having another breakdown.”

  He took out the DVD and replaced it with another.

  “What you’re about to see now is from four days ago. This was taken by surveillance cameras from my fiancée’s daughter’s school. The headmaster of the school is an old friend of mine and so he made a copy for me.”

  He hit the Play button and the screen came to life.

  The video shows the same white PT Cruiser parked across from the Larsen School. Claire
sits behind the wheel, staring intently toward the building’s front gate. She does not get out. She barely moves. She looks like a sniper. A clock records the passing time.

  “She sat there for three hours,” Miller said when the screen went black again. “Three hours, just watching.”

  “Did the school call the police?”

  “No,” Miller answered. “There’s really no law against someone sitting in a car. And they didn’t know Claire. They didn’t perceive any danger.”

  He returned to the seat beside me.

  “I wouldn’t have known about this if Charlotte hadn’t spotted Claire when she went to pick up her daughter.”

  “Charlotte?”

  “My fiancée. I’m getting married soon. That’s probably what set Claire off. Charlotte has a daughter named Emma. She is about the same age as Melody was when I married Claire. Claire thinks that I am going to ‘do it again.’ That’s the phrase she used when she wrote to me. ‘I’m not going to let you do it again.’ ”

  He said that he’d later called her. He’d wanted to deal with Claire personally rather than take this issue to the authorities.

  “I don’t want her to be arrested again,” he said. “I’m trying to protect her . . . from herself. I’m floundering, I admit it. Which is why I called you. I don’t know what to do in this situation.”

  He knew there were steps that he could have taken, given her stalking behavior at the school. But he’d tried to reason with Claire first. Unfortunately, she’d not been willing to discuss the issue with him.

  “She practically hung up on me,” Miller said. “But not before accusing me of having her followed. Which is completely ridiculous.”

  “Why does she think she’s being followed?” I asked.

  Miller shrugged. “How do I know? Maybe she saw something she took to be suspicious. Or maybe she didn’t see anything at all.”

  He released a tortured breath.

  “I’m getting married in three weeks. My concern is that whatever Claire intends to do, she will do it before then. Because she wants to stop the marriage.”

  “That’s not much time.”

  I could see real fear in his eyes. “She has a gun,” he told me.