“What kind of gun?”
“A pistol. She showed it to me. It’s an old relic that belonged to her first husband, but as far as I know, it still works.”
He looked at me in a way that told me I should take this gun quite seriously.
“Look, you may think I’m in a panic,” he said, “but when I think about last time, the nutty thing she did, and how angry she is now, I have to consider just how far she might go this time.”
His tone became imploring, the voice of a man who really needed help.
“I know I could hire bodyguards. But I don’t want to live like a prisoner. I don’t want Charlotte or Emma to live that way, either.”
“Do you think she might harm them, too?” I asked.
“I can’t say what she might do. That’s the problem. She’s crazy.”
He looked like a little boy who needed assurance that everything was going to be all right.
I knew that the moment of truth had arrived. “What exactly do you want me to do?” I asked.
Miller hesitated, a common response to this question. People who hire sin eaters are often reluctant to get to the point of no return.
Miller, like others I’ve known, took a roundabout way of getting there.
“Earlier you told me that you left the LAPD because you could never stop a murder before it happened,” he said finally. “Maybe this time you can.”
He seemed alarmed by his own dark thoughts. “I’m afraid of her, Sloan. I’m afraid of what she might do.”
I considered the possibility that Miller was exaggerating the danger posed by his ex-wife. Sure, the video showed a distraught woman, but sloshing paint onto a car, or even hurling a paint can at a cop, was a far cry from killing someone. That didn’t really matter, however, because by then I’d learned that it is as easy to underestimate a person’s potential for violence as it is to overestimate it. Miller was asking me to protect him, his fiancée, and her daughter from a woman whose behavior in both the past and the present scared him. She was a threat he wanted me to contain or neutralize. I’d had quite a few other clients in more or less the same situation, and I’d always been able to provide the service that was required. I saw no reason to feel that this particular case was any different from those previous ones.
And so I took the job.
“I’ll need Claire’s address and phone number,” I said.
He gave them to me.
“Where does she work?” I asked.
“No particular place. She’s a French teacher. Freelance. She goes from client to client.”
“Does she still drive the same car?”
“Yes.”
“Is it the only one she has?”
“As far as I know.”
“Does Charlotte live with you?”
“No.”
“I’ll need her address.”
“Why?”
“So I’ll know if Claire gets near her house.”
Miller looked at me quizzically.
“I can keep track of her electronically,” I told him. “No one needs to follow anyone anymore. Not physically, at least. If I see that she’s headed toward any of you, I’ll let you know.”
“Good. I’d appreciate that.”
“In the meantime, I’ll work on other ways to . . .” I paused because the word struck me as inordinately brutal. “Contain her.”
Miller suddenly looked relieved. He offered his hand. I took it with a firm grip.
“Thank you,” Miller said.
That’s how it began.
The end of my career.
3.
At the end of the day, Jake asked if I wanted to play a game of pool after work. I turned him down. Instead I went home.
The house was small and cozy, but when I went into it that evening, I felt the familiar chill of my father’s absence. I’d moved back in during his illness, done all I could to care for him. He’d put up a brave front, tried to make the best of it, even to the point of concealing his pain.
None of that was on my mind, however.
In fact, as I made dinner I hardly thought of my father’s recent death. It was his life that concerned me, particularly the way my mother had ruined his career in the LAPD by lodging a false accusation of corruption.
She’d made her charge in what the commissioner had later described to my father as a “crazy phone call.” She’d offered no details and provided no evidence for her accusation. My father was dirty, according to her, though not in the usual way. She never said that he took bribes. Money wasn’t the issue. What he wanted was to be commissioner. He did favors in order to get favors in return. A good word at the right moment that would bump him up the chain of command. He was, she said, “ambition’s whore.”
A week after that phone call, she’d gone into the little office my father had at home, taken the revolver from his desk, and shot herself in the head.
I’d come home from school later than usual that day. Like always, I’d expected to find the back door open. But it was locked. So I’d walked around to the front. Once inside the house, I’d called for my mother, but there’d been no answer. I’d gone from room to room until I’d found her in my father’s office.
She was lying on the floor with her legs drawn up under her. I could see only one side of her face, along with the blood that had pooled around it. For a few seconds I’d just stood there, too shocked to move or even cry for help. In that silence, it felt like everything had died.
I’d been only seven years old at the time. I’d known nothing about how completely she’d ruined my father. But over the years he had revealed the story bit by bit. By the time I entered the police academy, I’d put it all together.
Along with her accusation, my mother’s subsequent suicide had sealed the case against him. Her charge didn’t have to be true. And she might have had a hundred different reasons for killing herself. But put the two together, and who would appoint a police commissioner whose wife had killed herself after making such a phone call?
It was these grim events that explained my father’s abrupt retirement, followed by his sadness and disappointment, the isolated life he’d lived after that, with none of his old comrades by his side.
After my mother died, he’d struggled to raise me, supporting a single-parent household by working several jobs at once. He was a security guard at a department store, parked cars at the Ivy, manned the entrance gate at various movie studios. It was by doing such work that he’d paid the fees for my parochial school, bought me nice shoes and dresses so I wouldn’t look poor, and even managed to scrape up the money for my senior trip to New York City when I was seventeen.
Thinking of all this stoked the resentment I’d always felt against my mother’s cruel allegations, but it also reminded me of Simon Miller, of what his ex-wife was once again attempting to do to him. Like my father’s, his life was being ruined by a woman’s accusations.
After a quick dinner, I went through the material Miller had given me a few hours before.
Claire’s official records were gathered together in a single incident report that was long and thorough. A psychiatric evaluation was included, along with a “profile” that provided a general view of what she’d done in the wake of Melody’s death, which was to divorce Miller almost immediately.
But it didn’t stop there.
During the following weeks, she’d written letters to Miller’s law firm as well as to the California bar.
Miller didn’t take this lying down. He got a restraining order against her. Things got worse and worse. Finally Claire went to Simon’s house with a can of red paint. She wrote CHILD MOLESTER on his door and on his car. He called the cops. When they showed up, she fought. It was pretty clear that she was out of it, so the court ordered an evaluation by a state psychiatrist named Dr. Frederick Lind. According to Dr. Lind’s report, Claire claimed her father had tried to kill her. Lind thought this accusation was connected to the one against Miller. She’d offered no evidence for
either case.
There were other findings.
Claire Fontaine was
Suspicious and mistrustful of others.
Convinced that others lied about her.
Convinced that she was being persecuted.
Socially isolated.
Aggressive and hostile.
This had been followed by a stark diagnosis: paranoia.
Claire had stayed in a mental hospital for three months and been released only on condition that she would leave Simon Miller alone.
Miller had tucked two photographs into the same envelope. One was of Charlotte, an elegant woman in her early forties. Her clothes were expensive, though not ostentatious. She obviously had money, or came from it, but she wore her wealth easily, comfortably, like an old ring. The picture of Emma showed a girl in a loose-fitting summer dress. She is standing on the beach, her back to the sea, waving toward the camera. Her hair is long and blond, and her eyes are a shining blue. She looks happy, carefree, a radiant little girl.
My father believed that a homicide cop should always keep the victim’s actual self in mind. You had to look at a murdered person and say to yourself that this was a real person, with all sorts of feelings. A man, woman, or child who’d deserved to live and should have been given that chance.
I decided to take my father’s advice, do the same with Charlotte and Emma but with a different mission. My job was to prevent their being harmed rather find who’d harmed them.
After reading through Claire’s file, I decided that she could, in fact, be dangerous.
For that reason, I dug a little deeper into her, though not so much her past as her present. I wanted to know what she was up to when she was writing threatening letters to Simon Miller.
I started with her job and Googled “French Instruction. Claire Fontaine.” Her website popped up, complete with a photograph of Claire dressed very professionally and smiling warmly. You’d have thought she was completely normal emotionally and entirely professional in terms of her career. She expressed herself well and presented herself as the soul of reason. She’d devised a ten-question test by which her prospective clients could determine their current level.
Her web page mirrored her perfectly practical presentation of herself. There were no videos. No music or fancy graphics. Everything was completely by the board.
I looked at her ads on Thumbtack, Yelp, and Craigslist and found the same bare-bones approach.
Next I did a broader search and found her name scattered about here and there. A certain Loraine Ferguson had posted a photograph of her high school class, and there was Claire in her cap and gown, her face barely visible in a crowd of other students.
In a brief obituary, she was mentioned as the widow of Max Slater, thirty-seven, a civil engineer who’d died of cancer.
There were other mentions of her, but they didn’t add much in terms of her character, interests, or anything else. At twenty-three, for example, she’d been in the cast of a Venice, California, takeoff production of The Merchant of Venice. Claire had played a flower seller. Max Slater had been cast as “a villainous debt collector,” so this may have been how they met.
Public records revealed their later marriage, the birth of their daughter, Melody, and their purchase of a house in Mid-Wilshire, all perfectly ordinary citations.
Five years after her husband’s death, she’d married Simon Miller. Since Miller was so prominent, there’d been a short piece about the wedding in the LA Times, complete with a photograph of the happy couple, Claire in a white lacy gown, holding a bouquet, Miller in coat and tails.
After that, Claire’s life went dark.
On May 7, 2013, Melody’s body was found on a Catalina beach. According to the local news coverage, she’d been the victim of an accident. A later autopsy had indicated drowning as the cause of her death, with no suspicion of foul play.
Claire didn’t appear in the news again until June 4 of that same year. She’d evidently left Miller almost immediately following Melody’s death. But a month later she’d showed up at his house with a can of paint. The story took up a single column, and from experience I could see that it had been compiled from whatever police report had been filed on the incident.
For the next five years Claire’s name did not appear in any public documents.
But she was back now, threatening Simon Miller, as well as his fiancée, Charlotte, and her daughter, Emma.
I had to protect them.
In order to do that, I’d need to keep track of Claire 24/7.
Later that night I drove to the address Miller had given me. Claire’s car was parked on the street about a block from her house. I pulled over to the curb nearby, took a magnetized GPS tracker from my glove compartment, and walked back to the white PT Cruiser I’d seen in the video. The street was pretty much deserted. I didn’t have to linger before attaching it to the bottom of the chassis.
When I got back to my house, I drew up a containment strategy for Claire. When I’d finished assembling the elements of my plan, I calculated the time involved and estimated my fee. As always, I allowed for various contingencies that might increase the price. Once this was done, I filled in the blanks of my usual boilerplate contract and emailed it to Miller for his approval.
Nothing in this process was other than routine.
But life has a way of unexpectedly turning one thing into another: a high school crush into a marriage, a first job into a way of life, a simple plan into a tragedy.
It was past midnight by then, so I was a bit surprised that Miller got back to me within minutes, agreed to my fee, then added a final note: Whatever you have to do.
I filed this email in a computer folder just like the rest of them. I labeled it Claire Fontaine and assumed that her case would be no different from others I’d worked on. I would solve Simon Miller’s problem. It would all be neat and clean, and when it was over, I’d collect my fee and move on.
At that point my attention should have easily shifted to another client. Instead I continued to think about Claire, what she’d done to Miller, what she was threatening to do to him again, a train of thought that brought my mother storming back into my mind. As the minutes passed, these two women merged in a sinister and insidious way, my hatred for my mother bleeding into my feelings for Claire Fontaine.
Bleeding, I would think later. Yes. That was the right word.
Claire
RAY PATRICK IS sitting by the window at the Starbucks when I arrive. He’s dressed in white trousers and a light blue shirt, dark blue suede loafers with a tassel, no socks. These clothes come from some high-end store on Rodeo Drive. He is tall, slender, with salt-and-pepper hair.
He rises as I come toward him and offers his hand when I reach him. “Nice to meet you, Claire.”
He holds my hand for just a single extended beat. “Would you like coffee?” he asks.
I shake my head, then notice the book he was reading as I came in. A biography of Leonardo da Vinci he’s placed on the table.
I nod toward the photo of Leonardo on the cover.
“His first memory was of a bird. After that, he was obsessed with flight.”
Ray seems pleased by this little story. “You know a lot about him, I see.”
“He was sort of my specialty in college.”
“Ava mentioned that you studied art in Paris.”
“The history of art. I’m not a painter.”
“I’m not either. I just sell what others paint.”
This strikes me as gently self-deprecating, a trait I like in people.
In that way, Ray reminds me of Max. There is the same ready smile. I tell myself that such comparisons are fruitless, as well as unfair to Ray, or any other man I might meet.
Ray leans back slightly.
“When did you begin to study French?”
No one has asked me that question in a long time. Perhaps that’s why it powerfully returns me to that earlier life. As if I have it in my hand, I see my widowed grandmot
her’s letter asking me to come to Paris, opening her house to me, offering to provide for my education. I see her elegant French handwriting: Tu seras en sécurité ici. You will be safe here.
Loin de ton père. Far from your father.
She alone had believed me.
She’d even tried to persuade my father to let me go to France as a way of protecting me. He’d refused. Why would I let a woman who thinks I’m a monster raise my daughter?
Such had been his only explanation.
When I was eighteen, it had no longer been up to him, however, and so I’d accepted my grandmother’s offer and taken the first plane to Paris.
“I got the opportunity to live in France,” I tell Ray. “In Paris.”
“How long were you there?”
“Four years. While I went to college.”
“Were those the best years of your life?”
“Among them, yes.”
“You knew a little French before going there, I suppose.”
“Why do you suppose that?”
“Your name—Fontaine.”
“That was my father’s name, but he didn’t speak French. It was my mother who was French. She taught me from the time I was a baby. She started with her favorite word.”
“Which was?”
“Amour.”
I expect to begin the lesson immediately, but his tone remains casually conversational. “Are most of your clients adults?” he asks.
“About half.”
“How old is the youngest?”
“Four.”
“That must be a challenge.”
“Not really. I like teaching children. They can be so . . . absorbent.”
“Can be, but not always, right?”
“Not always.”
“This four-year-old, is it a girl or a boy?”
“A little girl.”
“They can be quite charming, little girls.”
“Little boys can be charming, too,” I tell him.
He nods. “Of course.”
I take out my notebook. “Shall we begin?”
I don’t know why, but during the lesson every word in the vocabulary I teach Ray calls up a swirling tide of memory.
Maison. House.
An Inconvenient Woman Page 6