He Said, She Said

by John Decure

  “Doctor.”

  Nodding, I took back my aching hand, vaguely jealous of her new friend and bodyguard. Then again, I’d have paid money to see Dr. Don or Heidegger try to get in Bradlee’s face as she left the building. Almost hoped they’d try something. Fellows would gladly break any pipsqueak professional in two if they even thought about it.

  Then I opened the anthology and pulled out the bookmark. It was a business card: Bradlee Aames, Deputy Attorney General, Department of Justice, Office of the Attorney General. Beside her name was a big, blue DOJ seal featuring the blindfolded maiden of justice, her scales dangling in perfect balance. On the back of the card, in black ink, Bradlee had written her personal phone number, with the following note beneath it:

  Call me!

  I began to replace the card in the pages of the anthology, but then… what was I, stupid? It wasn’t a bookmark. I put it in my wallet. Took it out, in the elevator, read it again. Held it in the palm of my hand the rest of the way down. No one else could see it, but like a magician, I knew it was right there, where it should be.

  * * *

  DESHAUN FELLOWS

  We got ourselves out of the building and I thought Miss Bradlee would want to go home, get some rest, considering all she’d been through. But she had other ideas. I got her in the car, and she gave me directions to a restaurant jus’ a few blocks away, over on Second, called the Fox Inn. No sign of any foxes anywhere, jus’ a lot of old nautical junk on the walls—you know, old ships’ wheels, diving helmets, and giant seashells stuck in fishing nets. Place did have food cooking—you could smell the fish frying in back—but the eatin’ part seemed like more an excuse for people come on in here and get to drinking. Middle of the afternoon and there must’ve been thirty, forty folks all dressed up for court like us, getting good and tanked.

  Exactly what Miss Bradlee had in mind.

  I wondered which of the other folks here were celebrating victory and which were drowning their sorrows. No way to tell, of course.

  She ordered a couple of gin and tonics, made them both disappear before the waitress even walked away. Then she ordered an ice tea for me, plate of appetizers.

  “Sorry, Deshaun,” she said. “But if I didn’t send in reinforcements, you’d have been cutting me out of those cheesy fishnets.”

  “Don’t have to explain a thing, Ms. Aames.”

  “Don’t I know it. You’re the best.”

  One more gin and tonic and she seemed all set. It was like, her eyes stopped dancing around—like a pool of water’s bubbling and gurgling as it fills up, but when it gets near full, it gets real calm and you can’t hear the gurgle anymore.

  “I’m switching to ice water,” she tells me. “Don’t let me order another real drink.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Food comes, and it wasn’t bad, but let’s just say it didn’t hold a candle to the kind of Southern cookin’ you can get down in South Central, or even over on Crenshaw, Leimert Park by the mall. But I was hungry, and the company was good.

  “When are you moving, Deshaun?” Bradlee Aames asked me after the plates were cleared. “Reevesy and I expect a guided tour of Bourbon Street.”

  “Soon,” I said. “Gotta wrap up some business, first. But come see me, you’ll get the A-one N’awlins tour to beat all tours.’”

  What I don’t say is: I know Bulldog’s got homies, and if they come for me, I don’t want Ida Mae or any other family anywhere in the vicinity.

  “Listen, Deshaun,” Miss Aames says. “I’ve got a college girlfriend who’s been a deputy DA her whole career. She heard about the shooting and called, left a message on my work phone. You know, the anything-you-need kind of message.”

  I stare at her, hard, thinking: how you reading my mind?

  “I already called her back, during a court break this morning. Told her about our good buddy Bulldog. She said she’d make a few calls, look into what happened. Guess what? She called back; we talked during the lunch break. He’s already under arrest.”

  “For the shooting?”

  “Not that. That little shit’s a person of interest in two bank robberies. The feds are all over his ass.”

  “You don’t say!”

  Hmm—young Lester had more nerve than I ever gave him credit for.

  “LAPD’s got a detective on the shooting. We’ll have to give statements tonight or tomorrow. Maybe we can go to Parker Center together.”

  “Sure, sure thing,” I say, still surprised. And relieved.

  I sit back, fiddling with my iced tea. Thinking: wow. Sometimes I forget how powerful the government is, compared to the little old man-on-the-street, like Deshaun.

  “Anyway,” she says, “after the shooting, about ten people on that movie set ID’d his ass, and he still got away. Got picked up two days later in Inglewood, right around the corner from your place.”

  “You think he came looking for Ida Mae?” My jaw is hanging open like a busted gate.

  Miss Aames’s face, it changes. “Oh my God, Deshaun.” She reaches across the table and takes my hand in hers. “I didn’t even think of that.”

  “Maybe we should go,” I say.

  “Wait. There’s more. Those two robberies? Apparently he was part of a three-man crew.”

  “I know that, ma’am. Heard it on the street. That’s what’s worrying me.”

  “Well, don’t you worry, Deshaun. He was busted at one of their houses. All three of them were in the garage. And they had guns. Automatic weapons. A box of grenades. They didn’t find the gun he used on me, but it sort of doesn’t matter. Three felons, in possession of illegal firearms. You know what that means.”

  “I… think so,” I say, the blood—and feeling—coming back to my face again.

  “Gone, baby, gone.”

  Bradlee Aames took a long, deep swig from her ice water.

  A steaming plate came floating by our table, a delicious fried-shellfish smell I knew by heart.

  “I’ve never had crayfish,” she says. “I typically don’t eat meals that can stare back at me while I’m eating them.”

  “Well, I can understand that. Though I have seen you in action in a courtroom. Seems like your appetite’s workin’ fine.”

  She liked that. “But I’m willing to make an exception, if you think I should.”

  “I know the prime spot in the entire state of Louisiana for crayfish, ma’am. Fresh caught. Served any way you like. Be glad to take you and your friend there myself.”

  “Tell me all about it, Deshaun,” she says, sitting back as her tired eyes rolled closed. “Paint me a pretty picture…”

  33

  BRADLEE AAMES

  Once the trial was over, time seemed to accelerate, and with it, a settling of accounts past due, as if the universe refused to withhold any longer a backlog of relative karma, good and bad. Like most people I know, change makes me uncomfortable, especially too much at once. Yet, despite my instinctive resistance, I did what I could to keep pace.

  My wounds were healing well enough, leaving little trace of the shooting beyond a few dime-sized pink scars, one above my hip and another beneath my ribs. The blunt-force trauma I’d suffered when the back of my skull rapped the pavement downtown wasn’t manifesting itself in any of the medical images the doctors studied, nor was I experiencing any side effects, aside from having to dispel an intense impulse to pick at the crusty scab beneath my hairline. But the sticky stuff back there fell off within a few weeks, which to me, was fittingly symbolic, because by then I was more or less back to my hard-headed ways.

  Inside my head, however, I was evolving—at least in my approach to coping with the world. For one thing, I was no longer willing to write off medications and just go it alone forever-after. Obviously, there are times when narcotics do nothing but hopelessly obscure my perspective—such as in a courtroom, during trial. Drugs stunt my rational-thought processes. I can’t practice law that way, and won’t. So for now, even if I’m seeing monsters, I’m otherwise stra
ight. But Craig—Dr. Weaver, I mean—thinks there may be lower-dose combinations that could help me without zapping my brain into a lethargic stupor. He helped sign me up for a trial program with a leading neurologist at UCLA that’s focused on treating high-functioning schizoid and delusional patients with meds designed to tread more lightly on the brain’s executive-decision-making abilities.

  Not that I trust modern pharmacology, but it’s worth a shot.

  I’ve also had to acknowledge the fact that my list-making system of discerning reality from unreality has its limits, especially in bizarro LA, where recently, what I believed was an intense, deeply personal vision of Justitia came calling on me to—I don’t know, gauge my true commitment to fairness, truth, and equity under the law, or some other deeply meaningful bullshit. Well, the supposed vision, which had me in tears befitting a career prosecutor, turned out to be real and involved an unemployed actor in a Statue of Liberty get-up pimping sandwich specials for a New York deli down the street. Sometimes reality dishes harder and crazier than my sketchy brain, and documenting the disparities can seem like a self-defeating waste of time.

  Another simple truth that hit me in the face is that my condition sometimes affects other aspects of how I function. I was reminded of this on a three-day weekend during which I was consumed with cleaning out my closet and rereading Siddhartha. Yes, I am aware that becoming obsessed with a task long neglected while simultaneously binge-reading is nothing clinically abnormal—but then, failing to bathe, eat, sleep, or even brush my hair or teeth for seventy-two hours straight is yet another. Poor Reevesy, he didn’t know what to say or do, and it wasn’t until he slid onto the far end of the couch to watch his favorite Mexican soap opera with a clothespin on his nose that my shame propelled me to rediscover the essentials of good personal hygiene.

  In hindsight, I think I hadn’t bathed because that function of rational judgment lay dormant, like a loose wire in my head. The intense concurrent desires to clean and organize and read voraciously served to eclipse any simple acts of personal maintenance that would otherwise demand due attention. Not normal; but not alarming, either. Even mild bouts of mania have their signs, and I’m learning to be more watchful.

  Which is hard to do when I’m sauced on JD. I know—this hardly qualifies as a news flash; but if I’m going to live better, and longer, I’ve got to examine the whole of my coping behavior. My hospital stay included a liver panel and an eye-opening set of results. I won’t bore you with the details, but let me just say that drinking to self-medicate is like ridding your house from termites by burning the fucker down.

  As I mentioned, time seemed to fly by, especially at work. The board revoked Donald Fallon, MD’s medical license on a Tuesday. His attorneys filed an appeal in Superior Court that Wednesday, asking a judge to find that the revocation was an abuse of the board’s discretion, and to issue a writ of mandate ordering the board to reverse its decision. They also asked the court to issue an ex parte—or immediate—order staying the board’s revocation. Because of this last request, I had to fly to Sacramento, where the appeal had been filed, to argue the stay that Thursday.

  Why Sacramento, for a case tried in LA against an LA psychiatrist? Well, because the court-venue rules allow the defense to choose to file either in the county where the case was tried, or the county where the opposing party is located—and since the medical board’s headquarters is in the state’s capital, Sacramento is a proper venue. Defense lawyers choose Sacramento over LA because the courts up north are far less busy and, in turn, may be more amenable to giving a case a closer, more detailed review. Or so they hope.

  The courtroom I attended that Thursday for the Fallon appeal bore out the less-is-better theory to a tee, as the place was empty. Heidegger was there in a double-breasted glen plaid suit, looking a lot like an old geezer that hawks gourmet popcorn on television. When I walked in, he was busting a gut to ingratiate himself with the judge’s clerk, a middle-aged woman in a simply cut navy cotton dress with a chiffon sweater draped over her shoulders. Though the clerk paused to take in my standard black ensemble, by the time I handed her my card she’d recovered and actually complimented me on my handbag.

  “Prada?”

  I smiled and said no. “Melrose.”

  “It’s lovely. In a hellfire kind of way.”

  “I love that description. Thank you.”

  I also complimented her pearl-inlaid silver brooch. We chatted like women do about fashion, and that rusty old buzz saw Heidegger was forced first into silence, then a retreat to the bailiff’s desk, where a uniformed man the size of a weightlifter sat at a tiny desk perusing a fly-fishing magazine.

  The judge, a bald, stooped man with horn-rimmed glasses and a big nose, had a brief sideways gander at me the way men sometimes will, but his voice was gentle and his manner was welcoming. He listened first to Heidegger’s strident plea—“Your Honor, this case is a travesty of justice!”—with an eye-roll that told me to take a more low-key path, which I did when I responded.

  To get a stay of the board’s revocation order, Heidegger had to convince the judge that they’d likely win this case on appeal. I pointed out that the state had proven what had happened with credible witness testimony from the victim and multiple corroborating witnesses, and that on appeal, those witnesses’ credibility could not be reassessed, since their testimony could not be observed.

  The judge agreed, sending Heidegger, whom he judged to be far less than a sure winner in this review, back to LA with a denial.

  Of course, Dr. Don’s appeal could continue even without the stay, but the evidence in the trial record suggested that a win was unlikely. In the meantime, his license was revoked. He’d have to relinquish his office lease and let go his support staff. His patient base would disintegrate, cutting off the supply of sad, damaged, unsuspecting women willing to place their mental well-being in his hands.

  That Thursday up in Sacramento was a good day, so good that I felt the desire to slow down at some point in order to reflect upon my… okay, my fortunate circumstances. That moment came on the flight home in a half-empty jet at thirty-six-thousand feet. I’d taken a window seat and, twenty minutes aloft, found myself gazing east toward the deep green mighty tumbling folds of the Sierras and beyond, where great dormant pastel high-desert plains rolled silently toward Nevada. Late-afternoon high clouds raked over the tree-spiked mountaintops like roaring whipped cream freight trains. My breathing slowed as my mind settled into a sublime quietude. So peaceful, to skim the world’s gentle curvature at this elevation, above all the confusion and messiness and lies and contradictions and human failings.

  Way high, where the plum-colored rim of the sky bled into the infinite backdrop of deep space, I glimpsed a shape, a ghost moon, an orb, a dark planet—I don’t know, some far-off place not so distant as to go unseen; but it was floating there, close enough, indeed, to serve as a receptacle of space explorers or telescope dreamers or souls untethered to the physical world but aching, still, to find a home. The jet engines hummed beneath my seat and the arid canvas scrolled by, turning twenty shades of parched brown against the odd finger-pointing scrawl of highway here and there. A distant reservoir shone like a lost nickel at the foot of a worn-out mountain. The cabin was as quiet and still as the landscape below.

  I kept my gaze aloft, studying the planet’s shape, readying to transport myself, conjuring the kind of dumb wonder necessary to power any great leap of faith. This must be the place, I told myself. My destiny was to be the dark planet’s first leader, ruler, its moral arbiter, its heralded leather-clad skull-and-crossbones-bejeweled taste-maker—

  Then the plane hit a bump, jarring me—and the planet… which, I instantly realized, was a reflection on the surface of the glass I’d been peering through. It was one of those startling moments of consciousness-shifting recognition, like when you’re staring at a butterfly’s silhouette and realize that instead, those are two faces kissing.

  I’d been studying myself, con
structing a world within my unblinking eye.

  I was already there, where I wanted to go.

  The jet banked right like a knife-blade descending, and through my little porthole LA’s limitless gonzo freaky-deaky light show took over. The flight attendant who’d brought me a cranberry juice earlier stood by on the aisle like a dumbfounded freckle-cheeked kid in orange polyester, dipping her head to take in the view over my shoulder. Said she was from Turlock, a small-town San Joaquin Valley girl. No matter how many times she flew into LAX, she couldn’t quite wrap her head around the colossal scale of the place.

  “Neither can I,” I admitted.

  What I didn’t say was that there’s a vastness that, coupled with the impersonal vibe that comes with living among nine million strangers, makes this city feel overcrowded and at the same time, as lonely as the moon.

  “You from here?” she asked.

  I told her yes, I was, just as the jet wheels chirped, shaking the fuselage. Her Turlock-girl smile was genuine, and thus, incapable of masking heartbreak.

  “Then welcome home.”

  I nodded, then turned to peer into the window, thinking: my planet is gone.

  * * *

  I’d promised to mail a copy of the judge’s decision to Rue Loberg, which I usually do with any key witness in my cases; but when the time came, just dropping a document into an envelope seemed way too impersonal. Considering how much Rue had been through, such a mechanical gesture was damned near insulting.

  Why, I wondered, hadn’t I thought of this before? I’ve had plenty witnesses put their asses on the line for me in court, and I never blinked when walking to the mailbox to fire off the final verdict without any cover letter or even a personal note of thanks, as impersonally as you please. In truth, I’d been too enamored of my singular prosecutorial bent, content to see the push and pull of legal battle only in terms of my winning or losing on points of facts, law and evidence. My witnesses’ moments of suffering, discomfort, confrontation, and humiliation were to me… just moments. My lawyer’s perspective was alarmingly inadequate.