by Avery Duff
Later, the San Fernando Valley haze obscured the stars over the state’s stale breadbasket. Up ahead lay Corcoran Prison. The thought of being cellies with Charles Manson was too much, so he pictured the firm party instead: Jack in the Brightwell study after he’d backed Jack into an alibi corner: Then where were you that night? Prove to me you weren’t in Culver City and this whole thing goes away.
Yeah, where were you, Jack? he thought. If you weren’t assaulting Yoga Girl, where were you?
He switched on his wipers, pressed his cleaner button. It was out of fluid, and his worn blades smeared dead-insect film across his view. His thoughts jumped to Jack and his pal Stanley, breaking in his condo—was that only this morning?
What was it Jack told him at the courthouse while Stanley was doing his thing? Remember this, Worth, as you count the endless hours of your new life dragging by.
Endless hours . . . dragging by . . . new life? If Stanley had been waiting to kill him, Jack’s words made no sense. He would be dead—not counting hours or anything else. Could be Stanley broke in for the receipts and nothing more. To steal them for Jack and to punish Alison and him for crossing Jack in the first place. That way, Jack takes a couple pounds of their flesh before he splits town with their money. And that way, Robert could spend the next slab of his new life fighting the IRS, losing his law license, going to prison, too, if Jack had his way.
He thought about Alison’s revolver, loaded, in the tire well. About Jack messing with his life on a whim, and he hated what Jack had done to him.
A guy like him, he was thinking. A girl like Gia, screwing up her life for him.
Gia. That night in the firm’s garage. Freshly fired by the man she loved, still she worried whether Robert would make partner. Even threw him a piece of advice: Always let him win. And after he drove her home from Santa Anita, she tried to help again: Do yourself a favor. Try to put this behind you . . . Jack makes people crazy.
“You think?” he said, crushing the empty Bull can.
She’d done bad things—he knew that—but in the end, she wound up with $500,000 that was actually paid by Dorothy, a billionaire’s daughter. And she fascinated him, not only because she was so cool and funny and beautiful. There was something decent about her. Something he’d always liked and still did. Nobody but Gia would ask him to use her money to help him with the IRS.
Who says that in LA and means it? he wondered.
Up ahead on the I-5: the turnoff to CA 152. As he exited, Erik called him back and brought him up to speed: “Stanley came to, but he’s not helping you out. Claims your marks on his face and arms is an allergy and says he gets it every year about this time.”
“Jesus,” was all Robert could think to say.
“Imagination like that, Stan should be writing movies,” Erik said.
For the time being, Robert decided to keep quiet about Stanley’s theft-only motive. Let Venice police keep murder pressure on him. That was magnitudes stronger than burglary-gone-bad-and-I-panicked pressure.
Screw Stanley, Robert decided. Let him make his own case.
And right then, something clicked inside his tired, Bull-ramped head, and Robert asked his friend to write up a new report: “There’s a two-by-four, back of a construction site on Quarterdeck, north side of the street. Stanley tried taking my head off with it. Might be wrong, but I think there was wet paint on it.”
“What color?”
“Green, I think.”
“Like a Forest Green?” Erik said, messing with him.
Erik told him he would check the site for Stanley’s fingerprints, and Robert decided to introduce Erik’s new police report to his missing banker: “A woman named Leslie DeRider used to work for a bank in Santa Monica. She quit her job today. I was told today by an eyewitness that she’s on the road in an Austin-Healey with a man named Jack Pierce.”
“Pierce,” Erik said.
“Right, and it’s possible they will try to leave the country. If they do that, I will be harmed financially. Harmed irreparably.”
“Hold on. That one p or two?”
“One p, three r’s,” he said. “So I’m going to try to talk to them, to stop them, before they can do that to me.”
“Stop them how?”
“Stop them with any legal means at my disposal,” he replied.
“Look, I’ll write it up. I don’t know what you’re up to, but you gotta come by and sign these last two reports.”
“Or they’re no good,” Robert finished for him. He didn’t want to get blasted for taking his Capitola road trip. “Can’t come in right now.”
“Look, my kids gotta see Shamu before he’s canceled or it’s my ass. I’m leaving for SeaWorld tomorrow come hell or—”
“I’ll try,” was how Robert ended it. That left Erik to check for Stanley’s paint prints and to give Robert’s regards to the world’s most famous killer whale.
CHAPTER 49
“You’re her sister?” the Brotman’s floor nurse asked, looking at Gia’s features.
“Half sister,” Gia said.
She stood at the nurses’ station on the sixth floor, saying she was in town on business from Vancouver, heard Alison was in the hospital.
“Room 665,” the nurse told her. “She’s the sweetest girl, no trouble at all.”
“Too sweet sometimes,” Gia said.
“Don’t upset her, all right?”
“Last thing anybody wants,” Gia said.
When Gia reached Alison’s door, she knocked. Waited till she heard, “Robert? That you?” She smiled and then walked in the room.
Alison lay in bed, her meds and a glucose IV marching into her arm.
Gia strolled over to the window and looked out. A good ten seconds passed before Alison said, “Who let you in, skank?” Dope slurry and anger cruised her voice.
“I don’t mind women sticking together,” Gia said, “but I’ve got to draw the line somewhere.”
“Lost? STD unit? Check the directory,” Alison said. She reached for her controls and rang the nurses’ station. They both heard faint ringing down the hall.
Gia looked at her now. “Mr. Worth’s not coming. Can you blame him?”
A nurse’s voice said, “Yes, Alison?”
“Not using Maxine Ellison tonight?” Gia asked Alison.
Even doped up, hearing her alias caught Alison by surprise.
“Hello?” the nurse’s voice said.
“Would it be too much trouble to get some cracked ice?” Alison asked, eyeing Gia now.
“Of course not,” the nurse said. “It’ll take a few minutes. How do you like your surprise?”
“You’re the best, Lupe,” she replied, clicking off the nurse.
“Like I said, he’s not coming,” Gia told her. “Hard to blame him, once he knew for sure you fucked Jack.”
Her hard words hung there while Alison sized Gia up.
“Think you can play at my level?” Alison asked.
Gia didn’t answer yet. She checked out this hard-core girl who’d revealed part of her real self. Gia took a chair by the bed. “Think so. You made tons of mistakes.”
“Think I screwed Pierce? Tell me how that works?”
“Let’s see. Oh, yeah. He was with me the night you claim he was assaulting you at your place. At the exact time you said, plus a few hours after that.”
“Doesn’t mean I fucked him,” Alison said. “She said, she said, right?”
“To the rest of the world, sure, but between us? I always knew you were a liar. Day one, I never trusted you.”
“I can live with your trust issues, but much as I’d like to, I can’t talk about the case. That nondisclosure agreement, so sorry.”
“You forget? I’m a party, too, so we can chat up a storm about the case.”
A direct hit. Alison lowered her mask even more. “Couldn’t help yourself, could you?” she asked. “You couldn’t wait to tell Robert your theory about me and Jack.”
“Guy that smart, he
didn’t need me to tell him. Mr. Worth has had you figured out for a long, long time.” Lying for Robert seemed to Gia like the honest thing to do.
“Think he minded when he went down on me last night? Or was it this morning?” Alison asked.
Gia didn’t take the bait. “Is he into amyl nitrites, too? Or is that just Jack?”
“With me, Robert never needed anything extra.”
“Something I keep asking myself—something you knew about Jack—sure you don’t mind?”
“Take a shot,” Alison said.
Gia stood up. “How does a client know that Jack Pierce—her lawyer that she never had sex with—how does that client know Jack pops amyls during sex?”
Alison didn’t answer. Because there was no plausible answer.
“See,” Gia said, “you’re right about the amyls. I know from personal experience, so I know you had sex with him at least once. Otherwise, a client doesn’t ever guess that. Or risk being wrong about such a rare kink. One detail too many, hotshot.”
She must’ve nailed it because Alison sat up on the other side of the bed and checked her phone for texts.
Gia said, “Knowing Jack, I’m guessing you two had a deal and he switched gears on you.”
“One time, straight sex,” Alison said, dropping her front. “So he’d try my brother’s case. Then it was again and again, then complaining about his time on the case, and then he wanted a three-way, and I saw how it was really gonna go.”
“Coulda saved you the trouble. It never ends with that guy.”
“With either of them,” Alison said.
“Who, Mr. Worth?”
Alison nodded. “He’s obsessed with beating Pierce, has dead-sister issues, too. Kept lots of her pictures around his old place, and for a farm boy? God knows what that’s all about.”
“The girl in the prom dress? Rosalind?” Gia asked.
“Yeah. Got raped, OD’d, killed herself.” Alison shrugged, yawning.
Gia went back to that north-facing window. Somewhere up there, Robert was racing toward Capitola. Fuckin’ guy, she was thinking, missing him already. Then she asked Alison, “You ever wonder about your lawyer’s angle?”
“Him, an angle? Straight shooters don’t have angles, but I banked two-point-seven million that’s saying I don’t care.”
Gia walked around the bed to face Alison. To take a long look into the other woman’s eyes. Nothing good was lurking behind them, Gia decided.
“On your two-point-seven million, Maxine? When you show up at the bank, all scrubbed up and excited tomorrow, you better hope the bank never needs to look into your background. With your alias, Maxine, and God knows how many more, they might figure you for a con artist on that two-point-seven. They might not believe a word that comes out of your mouth, Maxine, about that money.”
Alison shrugged off Gia’s commentary. “Bank’s not looking at me, skank. It’s my money.”
“You say so,” Gia said.
Gia took a last look at the patient. “And you’re all wrong about Mr. Worth. He’s a sure thing. The only sure thing I ever met.”
As Gia was leaving, that floor nurse carried in a glass of cracked ice on a tray. She heard the nurse saying, “You shouldn’t be up, Alison.”
And Alison telling her, “Fuck off, Lupe!”
CHAPTER 50
Oncoming headlights flashed across Leslie’s tattooed calf.
“Always liked your tat. You didn’t overdo it like most girls,” Jack told her.
“Thanks, baby,” she said.
The Healey rolled past a road sign in the dark: APTOS, CA POP. 25,708. Top was up, Jack behind the wheel. In a short skirt, Leslie had her back against her door, her feet resting in his lap.
Since leaving Point Dume four hours ago, they made good time. After the picnic, they burned those stolen receipts in a champagne flute and watched them float away.
“We did it. We’re free,” she told him back on the beach.
“Finally,” he said.
“It’s unbelievable,” she’d said. “Fuck the world, Jack. Nobody knows where we are, where we’re going.”
“You’re right,” he said. “We’re amazing. We pulled it off.”
Not far up the road from Point Dume, she’d suggested using her burner phone to call Stanley’s landline.
“Just to see if Stanley answers,” she told Jack.
“Bad idea,” he’d said.
He explained that either Stanley was dead, dying, or hadn’t taken the bait. That Stanley could be as pissed off as much as he wanted about the heroin in his mailbox but couldn’t mention his suspicions without implicating himself.
“For Stanley, dropping a dime on me means him doing time, and believe me, he fears jail. Fears it more than dying.”
“C’mon, baby, my phone’s a throwaway,” she said.
“What do we know about throwaways?” he asked. “The Feds ever start looking for you, who knows how deep they dig? So why risk it? I don’t know what I’d do if you got in trouble.”
Since day one, she had always taken his advice on risk. Sure, both of them had taken risks, but they’d been calculated ones: her keeping Jerome in his office, away from Robert—her fiancé—and Alison; Jack waiting for her at the airport to fly two endorsed checks out of the States, to deposit them with those Antigua bankers before rerouting the funds to Asia; and her delivering heroin to Stanley’s house in that UPS getup.
But Stanley had lingered in her thoughts. Earlier, she’d asked Jack, “Best guess, you think Stanley’s toast or what?”
“Dead. He’s been clean so long, he’ll OD. He’s never run smack that pure in his life.”
“Dougie scored for us big-time, huh?”
“For once,” he said.
She laughed. “I know. He was born to fuck up.”
Dougie had scored that junk in Stanley’s mailbox from an addict he knew from beach volleyball: a walking-around addict who lived on one of the Venice canals. In Suite 207 one afternoon, she and Jack had boxed up the junk in a jewelry box with slick, white wrapping paper.
“Think Dougie finds a way to mess up?” he asked.
“Fifty-fifty,” she said.
They’d already decided it was okay if Dougie dropped the ball leaving her cell phone on the train. So what? It was a last-minute touch, anyway: Leslie’s phone pinging on the eastbound Sunset Express till its battery died. A bogus signal for anyone who might be looking for her. Or looking for them. They figured her phone would die somewhere in New Mexico.
Now the Healey rolled out of Aptos. Another road sign ahead: CAPITOLA, CA.
“Shit, Capitola,” she said, looking at Google Maps.
“Almost there,” he told her. “Grab my briefcase.”
She leaned over and massaged his crotch. “This one?”
“No, the other one.” He smiled.
She pulled his briefcase from the small storage space in back. “We could’ve burned Gia,” she said. “Would’ve been easier for me than burning those other two.”
“Too many ties to me, angel. I lived with the woman.”
“For a week is all.”
“One day is too long. Neighbors probably saw me, and you never know who Gia talked to about me.”
“She never talked about you. Long as I knew her, not once. It was unbelievable.”
“I’d still be the live-in guy,” he said. “The dude.”
“Worse, the live-in lawyer dude.” She smiled. “I think you still dig her.”
“You’re the one, Les. Want me to prove it again?”
“Anytime you want, baby.”
“Then open my briefcase, grab a pen, and write down the password.”
“I memorized it already. It’s in your wallet, too, right?”
“Not anymore. Now, it’s only in my head.”
“What if you fucked my brains out,” she said, “and I couldn’t remember anyway? Or we fucked each other to death?”
Both of them laughing.
“Hu
mor me, would you? Write it down and show it to me,” he said.
She tore off a sheet of legal paper from a pad. She wrote a long series of characters and numbers. She showed him the result.
“Bravo,” he told her. “Again.”
“Why? It’s easy, it’s you,” she said, writing while she talked. “After I check us in, I want to do it like you did it with her. Only better. Everything better than her.”
“Gia was never up for the ocean at night. Afraid of it. Think you can cut it? Water’s three, four degrees colder up here. I mean, if you’re not up for it?”
“Let’s see who can cut it in the morning, Ironman.”
She was talking about the plan they’d made, the other reason she’d packed their long-sleeve wetsuit vests. Tonight, they’d hit the ocean down below the motel, and at sunup, they’d walk into that break north of Santa Cruz, the one called Four Mile. After, they’d leave behind their wetsuits like they walked into the ocean together.
“There it is,” he told her.
Ahead of them pulsed half the letters of a neon sign: SEAHORSE INN. Sixteen run-down, board-and-batten cabins. The cabin’s back walls faced the road and fronted the ocean. A convenience store glowed across the street. A banner out front: SILVER BULLETS ON SALE!
Pulling to the shoulder, well away from the office, he cut the lights and engine.
“Down and dirty, I love it,” she said, kneeling in her seat, staring back at the cabins.
“Thought you would,” he said. “Everything I promised and less.”
“No, seriously, I love it.” She wadded up her scrap paper, tossed it back in his briefcase, and opened her door.
Undoing her scrap paper, Jack double-checked Leslie’s password work, then closed his briefcase. Now he watched her moving into the parking lot. Her tattoo, he wasn’t kidding about liking it. Three simple symbols starting with $. Next was the British pound sign: an L with a single hatch mark on the stem. Last, a Y with a double-hatch-marked base: symbol for the Chinese yuan.
“It’s money, baby,” she liked telling him, using that line from the old Swingers movie.
As Leslie neared the inn’s office, Jack’s thoughts drifted to Worth. To tomorrow morning when Worth showed up at the bank for his nine o’clock and found out his banker was MIA. Looking around for his receipts after that—oh, no! Worth might never know exactly how he got blindsided.