The Big Bitch

by John Patrick Lang

  She looked embarrassed. “That’s really not what I wrote. To be fair and accurate—”

  “You don’t need to be fair with me, but I know that as a journalist you want to be accurate. At the risk of sounding pedantic, The Mandarins is clearly a ‘metaphysical’ novel, not, as you stated, an ‘existential’ one.”

  The young woman looked like she was going to cry.

  “It’s a common misconception,” said Muriel. “Look, I know you want an interview, so go to the theater and talk to Jenny—she will give you two comp tickets for the opening—and set up a time for us to meet. Jack here flew in from out of town to do an interview for his paper.”

  “An exclusive interview, Muriel,” I said. “As for distorting her philosophy, in your other writings I’m not so sure that you’ve stayed true to de Beauvoir’s premise that ‘one isn’t born a woman, but one becomes a woman.’ ”

  Muriel did a double take but she didn’t miss a beat. “Jack, have you come all this way to do an article or lose an argument?” She smiled.

  “Touché,” I said.

  “What paper do you work for?” asked the young woman.

  “A major Los Angeles paper,” I replied.

  “Wow,” said the girl. “The Times?”

  “A major Los Angeles newspaper. Let’s just leave it at that,” I said politely but firmly.

  “Please, see Jenny,” said Muriel, polite but dismissive.

  As the young journalist walked away, an exasperated Muriel, mimicking her perfectly said, “ ‘The Times? Wow!’ Now there goes a glowing testimonial to American community colleges everywhere.” Then turning to me, she said, “You’re pretty quick on your feet.”

  “But why the performance?”

  “Because I need all the publicity I can get, and I didn’t want to just blow her off. Also, it was fun improvising.” She stopped walking and turned to face me. “You were good. So where did you learn to be so devious?”

  “From an institution that’s a bourgeois obscenity. I was married.”

  “Bourgeois obscenity? Marriage?” she considered my answer for a moment. “So you have read de Beauvoir. The only reason a man reads her is either for a course credit or to get sex. Why did you?”

  “Both. But back to Jesus—”

  “No,” she said, “I want to hear about it.”

  “It’s not that interesting a story.”

  “Any story with sex as a quid pro quo is interesting.” she said, her curiosity somehow trumping her grief. “Tell me.”

  Outside of a few jokes with Dumpy Doyle and the confession I had made in rehab, I never talked about Angelina. It was as if I were afraid to awaken a spirit that I had lived with my entire adult life. A ghost sleeping a troubled sleep amongst the cobwebs and dust in the basement of my being.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  There is an imaginary plane that exists between people who have just met and it is measured less in inches than in intent. If this line is crossed, it usually indicates intimidation, disrespect, or just bad manners. However, when Muriel leaned in inches from my face, it was somehow charming.

  “Come on, the story,” she urged. She was close enough for me to smell the jasmine shampoo in her hair.

  “Okay,” I said, “I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes version. I was nineteen. She was forty. I was a student in her French Lit class, and one day she called me into her office to discuss a paper I had done. I was very naïve, but she quickly made it clear that she really wasn’t interested in my insights into the surrealist contributions of Éluard, or whoever I had written about. We had an affair for several months, and then at end of spring term she moved to Paris. In twenty years I’ve never heard from her.”

  “Please! That’s no story. What was she like? What did she look like? How did the affair end?”

  “She was like no one I had ever met up to that time. She was smart, exotic, sexy, and cosmopolitan. Her father was French, and her mother a full-blooded Cree Native American. She was beautiful. She never said goodbye; instead she left me a note that said, ‘I am sorry, but the poets have left me with nothing to say. Angelina.’ ”

  “ ‘The poets have left me with nothing to say,’ ” repeated Muriel. “Good line. That was her name, Angelina?”

  “Yes,” I said, suddenly feeling numb.

  “So Angelina was your Laura Reynolds?”

  “My who?”

  “An archetypical older woman character from Tea and Sympathy. A great American play of the fifties. The plot is pretty simple: a seventeen or eighteen-year-old boy goes to prep school and doesn’t fit in with the other guys. He ends up being befriended by a house mother, who seduces him. She has a great line about their affair; she says, ‘When you speak of us—and you will—be kind.’ ”

  “I never speak of Angelina, but if I did, I wouldn’t be kind.”

  Muriel repeated my remark and said she understood. Then once again she broke the imaginary respectful plane of our space and said, “I am beginning to believe that you and Jesus really were friends.” Leaning in close, she ran the tip of her tongue across her bee-stung lips and said, “I’m also convinced that I may be able to trust you.”

  Trust me? I remembered that Dumpy had loaned me a copy of Muriel’s A Nice Jewish Girl in Christendom. I didn’t find it to be the greatest one act play since The Zoo Story, but I was particularly impressed with a speech by a character named Brenda: “I found that I had the beauty, wit, and charm to have any man I wanted, and then I realized that I didn’t want any man. I wanted all men. Too soon, I discovered that all men were alike: they all start out as Romeo, and they all end up becoming Richard III.” Would she trust me enough to tell me just where in the transition between handsome, loving prince and vile, Machiavellian hunchback, Jesus had been when she last saw him?

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  In Oregon’s Willamette Valley, the mid-August sunlight comes at a long slant, revealing a world made green and beautiful by months of nearly constant rain. The smell of Scotch broom seems to whisper in the summer wind that life really is worth living and that hope does indeed spring eternal within the human breast. As for breasts, Muriel stumbled, and as she grabbed my arm to steady herself, she brushed me with her left one. While she didn’t seem to do it on purpose, I doubted that anything Muriel did was an accident. The contact wasn’t hard enough for me to report back to Dumpy whether it was filled with silicone or saline solution or not, but I was already wondering just what wasn’t artificial about her.

  “I was scared, not just broken-hearted, and after I settled my father’s estate I disappeared in Europe for over two years,” she said as we followed a winding path in a small city park. “Things were very weird. You know my father was Sid Lichtman. Did you know he was murdered in San Diego the same summer I was with Jesus?”

  “Yes. I met Budd Rosselli. The lead detective.”

  “That fat, condescending, worthless pig! He knew my stepmother did it but he was too stupid to prove it.”

  I wanted to tell her that he spoke very highly of her, too. But I didn’t, just like I didn’t tell her that her stepmother was my client.

  “Father decided he had to have a trophy wife,” she continued, “so he gets this former swimwear model who grew up in a trailer park and he introduces us. She has this throaty sexy voice just like Kathleen Turner in Body Heat. ‘So very nice to meet you. Sid says you’re a writer. Like Danielle Steele?’ ” Her mimicking of Grace Lowell was so dead-on it was almost uncanny. “Then the bimbo says, ‘Have you read her latest? I think it’s her best. We should have lunch.’ I’m thinking that I would rather be in a Turkish prison than have lunch with her. My dad takes me aside and asks me what I think of her, and I tell him it’s very exciting to finally meet someone who actually reads Danielle Steele. ‘And what bowling alley are you two going to get married in?’ He tells me I’m pampered and spoiled and he’s going to marry her no matter what I think. So he does and she murders him.”

  We came to a pond
where geese were quacking and squirrels were dancing in the trees.

  Muriel told me that Grace had stolen eight million dollars of her inheritance. She didn’t know how she did it, or who had helped her, but she had no doubt she was responsible for ripping off a safety deposit box of her father’s. She got away with murder and eight million dollars in diamonds. Although Grace had an alibi for the murder, Muriel was convinced she was culpable. As Muriel continued to accuse Grace to the police she was afraid that she too would be murdered. On top of all this, her whole affair with Jesus had become bizarre and scary, too.

  “Bizarre?” I inquired. “Beyond the priest thing and the crazy love?”

  “Did he ever tell you anything about his past?”

  “Just the story about his village. But when I asked about where that village was and about his seminary and other things, he always changed the subject. I didn’t press him. We were friends, and he didn’t want to talk about it.”

  “That was Jesus,” she said and looked away for a beat. “One time I reminded him that I had told him everything about me, but I knew nothing about him. I pushed him until he said, ‘Believe me, you don’t want to know about me. It could be dangerous. Don’t ask again about my past.’ He was as adamant about it as he was mysterious. I thought he might be running from some Guatemalan death squad or something. What really scared me was when we spent a weekend at Lake Arrowhead. I awoke at four in the morning to the sound of him speaking to someone in loud whispers in the other room. Jesus was angry, and I think it had something to do with a priest, because he kept saying ‘Padre. Padre.’ My Spanish isn’t good, so I couldn’t make sense of what I was hearing, but it sounded like Jesus was saying, ‘To hell with padre.’ When he came back to bed he was still so angry he was shaking. I pretended to be asleep. The next morning I went to get clothes from the closet and found a gym bag that neither he nor I had originally brought with us. When Jesus was in the shower I opened it up. It was full of cash. Stacks and stacks of hundred dollar bills. It could have been half a million dollars or more. Of course I never mentioned it to him, but I was convinced then that I didn’t want to know about his past. We broke up shortly after that, and I was just as paranoid about having known him as I was afraid of my stepmother.”

  I was certain the padre he spoke of was his father, Ramon de Poores.

  Muriel put her face in hands. When she took her hands away there were tears in her eyes.

  “He’s really dead, isn’t he?” she asked.

  “Yes. I’m sorry, but he is.”

  “I’m sorry he’s dead, too, but I won’t cry for him,” she said as she began to sob. I wondered who Muriel was crying for.

  “I can’t do this anymore today,” she said. “I know you have questions for me and I have questions for you. Come to the theater tomorrow for opening night; I’ll comp a seat for you and we can talk afterwards. I’ll give you some letters from Jesus that might help. I have to get back to the theater.”

  After I confirmed I would be there, she turned and started walking quickly away. Then she started running. Sprinting as if she could outrun grief, regret, and yesterday.

  I called Hobbs and told him I had located Muriel. I gave him her complete name and all the contact information he would need.

  “Hope you didn’t interview her. Hope you remembered that I talk to her first,” he said.

  “What I remember is that you are now going to deliver Polozola. You have him?”

  “Oakland has him, and if you want him you’ll need to get down here pronto.”

  Hobbs gave me a street address and said he would set it up for me to see Polozola.

  “What floor? What room do I ask for?”

  “Just ask for directions to the morgue.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  While sitting in the Eugene airport waiting for a late afternoon flight, I considered what Hobbs had told me. Polozola had been found in his BMW three blocks away from John and Mary’s Saloon with two .25 caliber gunshot wounds in his left temple and no wallet or watch. They did find his business card. He didn’t have a police record; however, he was a licensed real estate agent so his prints were on file in Oregon, and a positive ID was made. Preliminary ballistics established that it was the same gun that killed Jesus and Lichtman. And Eve Smith.

  I called Grace Lowell from the airport and told her I would have to set back our meeting. I told her I would personally verify it, but I believed that Jack Polozola was dead. I found her response odd.

  “Oh no!” she said. “That’s not good. That’s just not good at all.” Then she seemed to compose herself and asked who she could contact regarding arrangements. I told her I would get back to her the next day, after I viewed the body.

  The sun had just set as I climbed the stairs to my office. My door was ajar and the smell of cigar smoke filtered out. I slowly removed the Walther from its holster and wished I had taken the time to learn how to remove at least one safety.

  I entered the office with the pistol at my side. The silhouette of a large man was shrouded in the smoky shadows. He sat on top of my desk with his feet on four bankers boxes that weren’t mine, and pointed the burning end of his cigar at me.

  “You can put that pea shooter up, son. You don’t need it,” he said, but I kept it at my side. “Now, what you do need is a decent damn lock on your door. Flimsy little thing you got is as inviting as a gal at the bar wearing a miniskirt, stiletto heels, and stirring her drink with a toothbrush. And the locks on your file cabinet—hell, I popped them in two seconds with a paperclip.”

  “That why you’re here? To discuss my security?”

  “No, I’m here ’cause we might have us a little problem.”

  “We?”

  “Yeah, we.”

  “Is that the ‘editorial we’ or the ‘royal we’?”

  “I don’t think it’s the first one. Think it’s the other.”

  “How so?”

  “ ’Cause I think someone is trying to give us a royal fuckin’,” said Jefferson Davis Grubb.

  Part Two

  Left Turn on the Road to Damascus

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  I surveyed my surroundings to see if there were any other additions or subtractions to my office besides the bankers boxes and a senior citizen con man. It wasn’t a difficult task. The two worn client chairs, the so-called executive office chair behind my dinged-up metal desk, and the dual faux wood file cabinets made my office look like it belonged to a low level bureaucrat. One who was either on probation or had just been demoted.

  The only contributions I had made to my workplace were a cheaply framed print of Picasso’s Guernica and a Bose Wave mini hi-fi system. Beside the music player sat well-used CDs by Otis Rush, Freddie King, Albert Collins, Paul Butterfield, and one un-played disc called The Very Best of Son House. The reason I never unwrapped it wasn’t just because I wasn’t a Son House fan, but rather because I wished I had never unwrapped the woman who gave the recording to me. La Verne Ella Scott-Dixon. Not only was she the only woman I ever met with five names, but she almost always used them all. La Verne Ella Scott-Dixon was the reason I had moved to Berkeley, California, in the first place.

  One of the few colleagues who still spoke to me since my indictments was David Gass, a senior vice president in the emerging markets division of Wells Fargo Bank. Despite the fact that he dressed like he bought all of his clothes through the mail and appeared to have his hair cut at a barber college, I always found David to be a bright and decent guy. He called me and said he had a job for me auditing the closed mortgage loans of a 501c3 non-profit. He said the organization had been started eighteen years ago, was very successful, and was still run by the original founder and executive director. David also stated that this woman was just my type.

  “How so?” I asked.

  “She’s fortyish, beautiful, smart, sexy, and ambitious.”

  “That’s my type?”

  “Did I mention she’s black and built like the proverbia
l brick shithouse?”

  I took his point, and I subsequently took the job. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, along with Neighborworks, along with Berkeley, Oakland, and five other Bay Area cities had made grants and down payment assistance to the low-low to low-to-moderate income clientele of the Berkeley Affordable Housing Group. The ACORN scandal as well as a number of defaults had focused attention on the non-profit. To further exacerbate the situation, it was revealed that La Verne Ella Scott-Dixon’s annual salary of $198,000 was more than that of a U.S. Congressman. In the wake of the subprime shake-out, and the higher than national statistical average of successful homeownership by the non-profit’s clientele, the board of directors—one of the members being David Gass—had decided that an independent audit was needed because outside audits seemed imminent.

  David mentioned that he overcame early opposition to me by pointing out that if there was any illegality, impropriety, or irregularity to be found, I would find it, and to use his words “scrub it up.” He also privately assured the rest of the board that the executive director would not run over and otherwise intimidate me. After I was hired, it was determined I could use the vacant office of what had been the Oakland branch of the non-profit. It was further decided that all files were subject to review, going back almost two decades, and as it would be a three to four month gig, I would have free office space for all that time, and perhaps for up to the end of the term of the donated lease: three years.

  I took the job and waited a discreet thirty days before I took La Verne Ella Scott-Dixon to bed. It wasn’t exactly bed. It was the backseat of her Cadillac Escalade in the parking lot of a Berkeley Marina restaurant. The relationship ran out of gas like it always does for me. I found La Verne’s, “You don’t know how to treat a woman,” somewhat cryptic but at that point I was past caring. After six and one half months, David Gass, the executive director of The Berkeley Affordable Housing Group, and I had a closed-door meeting where I reported what the non-profit’s limited liability was and how to avoid it.