by John Decure
Bradlee Aames nodded for me to back off.
“That’s the wrong way anyway, doc.” Her hand, the bloodied one from before, came forth, the touch reorienting me. “Here; come with me.”
She was right. We scooted back out to shafts of direct sunlight and the big noisy boulevard—Los Angeles Street, I think it was—with street vendors and squealing brake sounds and an entirely new set of heartbreaking panhandlers to guiltily sidle past. Almost immediately a police cruiser drove by, and as I raised my hand to flag it down, Bradlee Aames dug her fingernails into my forearm until I yelped.
Technically I’d rescued her, so this was not the sort of gratitude I’d expected. I asked her what was wrong.
Her eyes were well hidden by a sleek pair of aviator sunglasses.
“You can’t be serious.”
Her sense of disgust with my cluelessness was plain, but as she turned her back on the black-and-white, she stood close to me as if we were a couple, placing her hand in mine and whispering for me to just be cool. For an instant, I felt young and free and—wow, boy—way more cool than any of my high school buddies in Advanced Calculus would’ve ever dreamed I could be. Yet I knew she was only using me to hide from the cops.
We watched the cruiser round the corner and disappear. Bradlee Aames shrugged.
I was still shaking.
“Sorry. I feel safer in their presence.”
She nodded. “You’re white, so you can say that.”
We started back up the street, north, toward Fourth Street and the court, but before she let my hand go, she abruptly stopped as if she’d forgotten something important. That’s when she kissed me on the cheek, setting off an electric tingle that traveled down to my toes.
Okay; even if she was using me, this wasn’t so bad…
I knew she’d been scoring drugs. A prosecutor who probably worked in that big Ronald Reagan government complex a few blocks away, so in need that she’d been willing to risk her career. And her neck. I’d read the names on the proof of service that came with the subpoena for Rue Loberg’s records. Spring Street, I think. We’d crossed Spring just before heading down that first alley containing the woman in the pink ski jacket. Of course Bradlee wouldn’t want to flag down a cop; the dealer she’d been seeking had probably sold to her before, which is what he’d say when questioned.
“Thank you,” she said very softly. “You’re a kind man.”
Then she smiled. I felt green, out-of-step. But alive—so alive I wanted to sing. Wow. I skipped a little to catch up with her.
At the corner of Fourth and Main, she slowed to look up at the stone columns of one of those marvelous old bank buildings sprinkled throughout the neighborhood. I gazed upon it with her, not sure what we were doing. Was this a test?
“This building,” she said. “What if I told you it chased me down the block?”
I folded my arms, said I didn’t do street corner diagnoses. Made her laugh.
“Don’t be such a tight-ass. I’m not your patient.”
My face got warm and my throat constricted. “No, I guess not.”
The bank’s façade was gray and angular and wonderfully stout in its proportions, classic in its solidity, the kind of structure that exudes strength and imperviousness. But mobility? Definitely zero.
“I’d say you may have been hallucinating. Having a vision.”
She arched a black eyebrow. “May have? Really sticking your neck out, aren’t you, doc?”
“I’m not your doctor,” I said. “So you can call me Craig.”
We turned the corner onto Fourth, walking slowly west, back toward the old Broadway building and courthouse. The stone buildings lining both sides of the street created a canyon of shadows, reminding me of New York and the charming city blocks around NYU, to be precise. Once again, my thoughts returned to college.
I’d come into Grand Central on the New Haven Line to visit my cousin Stuart, an NYU sophomore with a spirit of adventure that far outstripped his life experience. Made the trip a couple or three times on weekends, lured by the promise of private parties with hot co-eds and endless kegs. Stu was a pot-smoking econ major and his pitch was way better than the payoff; but after another grinding week of logic, statistics, and Kant, I hardly cared. Nonetheless, I’d end up sleeping on a couch that smelled like a gym locker and invariably getting stuck with the check all weekend until I’d limp back onto my northbound train Sunday afternoon, just as awkward and reserved as when I’d arrived.
It wasn’t my cousin’s fault that I’d always struck out, though; I was a terrible conversationalist with females, always analyzing their words for meaning that often wasn’t there, while never revealing a thing about myself in return. I took with no concept of how to give back. Was it any surprise that I’d ended up like this, lonely and listening to peoples’ problems for a living?
Bradlee Aames had stopped walking.
“Did you just say you’re lonely?” she asked.
“I, uh… no. Did I?”
“Okay, Craig. Here’s an observation of my own. You look a little zapped.”
“It’s… these buildings. Guess I was someplace else.”
She nodded, my tense reflection staring back at me from inside her shades.
“Happens to me all the time.”
Her comment was revealing. I could sense her suffering back in the courtroom, the way she’d seemed to hold herself together by clinging to every well-chosen word she’d offered in argument. And the drug-scoring foray? She was not paying close attention to her environment, to say the least. We were both lucky to have gotten out of that alley in one piece.
She looked up at a row of lions’ heads jutting from a shaded cornice a dozen floors above us. “They’re so beautiful. Each one tells its own story about how people lived in this city, what—a hundred years ago. Seeing what they saw, admiring the details, it makes me feel… connected to something bigger than myself.”
Huh—she was far more thoughtful than distracted. Admiring the local architecture while I was still jumpy with fear. Maybe this was not the time to psychoanalyze.
You want adventure, Craig? Then easy does it with the clinical patter—you haven’t crashed on Stu’s couch in ten years; just be yourself. Time to let a real adventure unfold.
I liked her. Found her very attractive, I admit. But I had to think of why I’d come here, had to put my priorities straight.
“You aren’t well,” I said, putting it out there for better or worse. “And self-medicating isn’t any kind of solution.” So much for adventure.
She pursed her lips bitterly. “No shit. But then, be honest. You’re not worried about me.”
I knew what she was getting at. “Okay, fair enough. So then, you tell me, what’s going to happen to Rue when she testifies?”
Bradlee Aames stepped back as if to appraise me.
“I get it. Today was supposed to be therapeutic, a feel-good field trip. But now that you’ve met the crazy, fucked-up lawyer for the state, you’re wondering why you ever brought her around here. I’m freaking you out.”
“I’m… concerned for my patient’s welfare.”
“So am I, doctor.”
“I didn’t mean—”
“I know my damn job. Hers is to tell the truth, her story. She does that, she’ll be fine.”
Then she tilted her shades up, her black eyes studying my face.
“As for you, Craig, you still look iffy.”
As far out of my element as I was at that moment, I was compelled to be professional. Or at least act the part. That much I owed Rue Loberg.
“I think you need a doctor.”
She bent at the waist, lowering her chin to assess me, close enough to land a kiss. Suddenly, Rue Loberg’s welfare was the furthest thing from my mind.
“Seems you’re the doc with all the answers. So… write me a scrip to quell this thunder running between my ears.”
Whatever I had to say on the subject remained hidden. My tongue was like a sla
b of rubber.
“Right, I thought so.”
She walked away, and I let her. I let her! Oh, God—oh, damn, damn, damn!
I might as well have gone back to my old dorm room, cracked open a behaviorist tome, and howled at the moon all by my lonesome. Still now—still now! That was where I belonged.
8
RAUL MENDIBLES
“No deal,” I said just a tick too loudly into the phone.
Myrna misunderstood me from halfway across the room, holding up a flimsy white teddy that looked like a see-through scarf.
“What? This one don’t float your boat, honey?”
I hate it when she uses terms of endearment in front of others.
“What the—did I just hear you correctly?” the Major barked from the other end of the line. “This case was supposed to be over by now. Whatever do you mean, ‘no deal’?”
I’d surprised myself by coming right out and saying it, just like that. No attempt at artful dodging. This whole mess—putting Bradlee back in action, and all the ambivalent feelings that came with that decision; seeing that patient in court, looking so sad and stepped-on; knowing that I was aiding Dr. Don, an exploitative weasel if ever there was one—which, by logical extension, made me an exploitative weasel as well—it was working me over, grating my insides raw. And so, emboldened by the need to escape my misery, I’d set myself free, if only for a moment.
“Here, baby, loosen up,” Myrna said, handing me a glass of white wine. “Isn’t this fun?”
She trickled her index finger under my chin suggestively.
“Sure,” I whispered, though a guttural scream would’ve been the more honest response.
“And a little naughty, too.”
More like a knot in the head, a big, fat, rock-hard one, right on my forehead. Naughty? Not the word I’d be inclined to use.
“Edge city, Myrn.”
Eight Latina housewives buzzing around my living room on a weeknight was neither fun nor naughty. But Myrna had asked me if her friend, Lupe Borbon, who had bought into a negligee franchisee operation called Sex E Grrl, could do an in-home sales party tonight, and I’d said yes. Myrna had been laying off the Mexican sweet breads and chile rellenos of late, and she’d lost eight pounds already. I figured I had to show support somehow. I just wish it hadn’t been tonight.
“I know it’s shitty, man,” the Major fairly shouted, thoroughly misconstruing my comment to the wife. “I am awaiting your explanation with bated breath, son!” he said as I stifled a chuckle. I thought the Major was going to pop a major artery, and I’d just sit back on the couch, sipping white wine, listen to him flop around on the floor like… I don’t know, a beached baby whale? Anyway, I’d monitor his whale gasps until whatever scant remnant of conscience or duty left in me took over and I dialed 9-1-1. But he was just warming up.
“Dammit, Mendibles, you made assurances!”
“The settlement conference didn’t proceed the way I thought it would, Major.”
“Of what value were those assurances?”
One of the invited moms, Consuela Lopez from around the block, pirouetted with a gauzy pink thing on her chest that, to me, looked like a bib for eating spareribs. The women went wild.
“Turn down the TV set, would you, Raw-ool? Sounds like that crazy bitch Oprah’s giving away cars again, and everyone’s screaming.”
“I like Oprah,” I said reflexively.
“Another reason you’re a nimrod.”
Myrna sashayed over to me with enough white fishnet in her hands to snare a sperm whale.
“Ooh, Raul, feast your eyes!”
Or maybe hide them.
“I ask you to secure a written settlement, and you give me used toilet paper, Raw-ool. That’s what you gave me.”
“It’s not that bleak.”
“You can wipe your keister with the ‘deal’ you worked out. We got zippo!”
“Who knows? Maybe Fallon will voluntarily resign.”
“Don’t you get sassy with me, young man! You led me on. Led me to believe the situation was in hand, when in fact, it was completely, totally out of hand.”
Out of hand—the phrase gave me pause. Okay, so we hadn’t settled, the case was still pending, the matter was still public—conceded, this thing was out of hand. But why? Because of a rogue lawyer, a sketchy pill-popper. Bradlee Aames, not a stinky rich talk show host handing out cars to a studio of strangers, but a true crazy bitch, the real damn deal. Bradlee Aames, the Lady in Black, dominatrix of my dreams. Out of hand? Could be, because obviously, I wasn’t thinking clearly about her. Bradlee has that spin-your-head effect on me—and my guess is probably a lot of other men, too.
But… this was not truly out of hand yet, not if I could simply fix the problem and analyze the situation better. Tame my feelings long enough to look at her coldly, as an opponent, a legal adversary.
In her condition, Bradlee could be outsmarted. Outmaneuvered. Defeated.
Lupe Borbon held up a wineglass in one hand and a fistful of what appeared to be colored slingshots in the other.
“Two for one on these buttless beauties, ladies!”
“What’s crackin,’ girl?”
“Whoo—the floss is the boss!”
“This one’s white and goin’ outta sight!”
“Where’s the coverage, Lupe?” another mom shouted amid much laughter.
“That’s the point, m’ija, the less coverage, the better,” Lupe said. “Am I right, Raul?”
They turned toward me. I raised my wineglass in salute.
“You’re right and it’s tight.”
The ladies fairly came unhinged by my borderline double entendre.
“The hell’re you talking about, Mendibles?” the Major shouted. “Fallon wouldn’t surrender a popsicle in an ice age! Get your head in the game, son!”
Time to think fast. I could squeeze Bradlee again to make a deal; but no… she already suspected plenty. So… I could reassign the case. No—people would notice. I’d look positively desperate dumping a sex case this close to trial. As a supervisor, nothing was stopping me from diverting the file elsewhere, but the unlucky recipient would size up this clusterfuck in no time, bitch and moan long and vigorously enough to get everyone in the office’s attention, then demand to know what they ever did to deserve such a pile of grief. And that pile would be funnelled into a tiresome, winnable union grievance I’d be stuck defending for years.
Generally, no good could come with bringing further attention to the case. Because Bradlee Aames was right: if you considered what Dr. Don did to that patient of his and her family, this sweep-it-under-the-rug resolution was indefensible.
“Just put the previous package back on the table,” the Major said.
“Secret weapon time!” Lupe cried. A collective howl went up among the ladies as Lupe held aloft an electric-blue device the size and shape of a prize-winning cucumber.
“Good god! What is going on there, a cheerleader convention?”
“Settlement is no longer a viable option,” I said when the noise level dipped to something closer to a drunken slumber party. “Almost half the board is made up of new members.”
“You just let me handle them.”
“They won’t be persuaded, Major. You know how the newbies always start out, wanting to show everybody how tough they can be, how they won’t play favorites, especially among their medical brethren.”
“Not to worry.”
“Only one of them needs to vote ‘non-adopt’ to the stip. One. Then it’ll get kicked over to the board’s next meeting for decision.”
“So what? We can massage that process when the time comes.”
“This free giveaway? I don’t see how.”
“Don’t be such a naysayer, Mendibles.”
Just then I felt a shaft the size of a billy club on my shoulder. Lupe, with an evil grin.
“Don’t worry, cowboy, I got your back!”
The other ladies hooted and whooped as I pushed
aside the projectile of pleasure, my hand cupping the phone.
“You didn’t care for my assurances before,” I told the Major.
“You blow smoke up my ass, I’ll call you on it. Every time. Just be straight with me, son.”
“I did not blow smoke up… at any rate, I’m through making promises. You got your inside track, know what the board would do with Dr. Don. Fine. I can’t calculate what they’d do from my remove. But if anyone bothers to closely read the allegations, they’ll sit on that stip, hold it over. They do that, we’re dead.”
“Hola, papazote!” Hortencia Ramos, the crossing guard at Lucita’s school, exhorted as she waved an illuminated see-through yellow dildo like a light saber.
“Look, its Princess Leia!”
“Hey, Jabba, get off the phone! It’s a party!”
The Major grumbled. “Hell’s bells. What kind of a madhouse do you live in?”
“It’s a lingerie party. Like Tupperware, where an enterprising lady brings her wares over and shows them off for sale. They’ve just moved from lingerie into the toy department.”
“Hell’s bells.”
“You wanted it straight.”
“Good God. Now listen closely. East LA? We’ve got a problem. Focus, dammit!”
Across the living room, Lupe sent me a gift, for in that moment, she reached into her pink shopping bag full of goodies, pulled out a new cordless wonder, set her shoulders back and straightened her spine for her next breathless presentation. Her black hair was wiry and not as long as Bradlee’s, but the image stuck in my mind.