by Lily Gardner
A Bitch Called Hope
Gardner, Lily
Diversion Books (2013)
* * *
Tags: FICTION/Thrillers
A Bitch Called Hope
A Novel
by Lily Gardner
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1004
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 2013 by Lily Gardner
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
For more information, email [email protected].
First Diversion Books edition February 2013
ISBN: 978-1-938120-97-8
For Michael and Mihkel, I love you.
Although I’ve used many Portland landmarks in this novel, I’ve had my way with them. Don’t expect to meet Jeannie at the Yuk Tav or any cops at the Shanty. No character is a thinly disguised ex-husband. It’s fiction, kids.
Epigraph
Hope, utterly deceptive though she is, at least leads us to life’s end by an attractive route.
—La Rochefoucauld
Chapter 1
When you’re working surveillance you sit for hours. Don’t even think of going to the bathroom because the minute you duck over to the Shell station is the minute your subject slips out of the house. When you’re on surveillance you drive a generic vehicle, you dress in slate gray clothes, the same color as the interior of your vehicle, so that if you’re lucky, someone walking down the sidewalk doesn’t notice the cute brunette staring at his neighbor with a pair of field glasses.
Surveillance is hard on your back and hard on your kidneys. Worst of all, it gives you a lot of time to think. Hours and hours of watching a house with its blinds drawn, thinking.
There was a whole range of subjects that Lennox Cooper did her best not to think about.
It was 7:10 in the morning the first week in December. The sun hadn’t come up yet and when it did no one in Portland would be able to see it through the rain. Lennox had parked her car across the street and two houses west of the residence of one Allan Lammers—age: fifty-two; occupation: welder; injury: back strain, lumbar region disc bulge, L5-S1. Lammers had been out seven weeks on an injury that typically took eight days bed rest, tops.
This was a neighborhood of modest one-story homes built during World War II for the shipyard workers. Lammers lived in the middle of the block in a little brick box of a house with dark red trimmed windows and door. The landscaping was tidy and predictable: boxwood, azaleas, and a border of rose bushes lining the driveway. One short year ago, Lennox was tracking murder suspects. Now she was critiquing some dude’s shrubbery.
She spooned a mouthful of raspberry yogurt with one hand and steadied her binoculars with the other. On the passenger seat a game of Vegas solitaire lined out. She was thirty bucks down.
The garage door at the Lammers’ estate levered upwards, and there was Allan Lammers behind the wheel of a freshly waxed Chevy pickup. Lennox had figured him for an early riser, after all, he’d worked first shift at Zeller Tool and Die for eleven years. Lammers torqued sideways, his head turned over his shoulder as he reversed down the narrow driveway. Such lumbar pain he couldn’t work didn’t mean he should drive over his wife’s roses.
Lennox flung her yogurt spoon on top of the solitaire hand, grabbed the zoom lens, and got a shot.
Waiting until Lammers reached the corner of Fifty-ninth and Holgate, she kept her headlights off and followed. He zigzagged through Portland’s southeast neighborhoods and headed north. Working-class homes in Lammers’ neighborhood were replaced by funky Queen Anne cottages where the eternal hippies from days of old still lived, worked and raised up a new generation of hippies from Hawthorne Street to Belmont. Then funky turned into Asian groceries and dry cleaners coming up northeast Sandy. She tucked a strand of hair under her watch cap and hung back as far as she could without losing him. This was the fun part, the part that called for reflexes and judgment. What surprised Lennox was how people never realized they were being followed. But hey, there are thousands of beater trucks like hers in Portland.
The rain let up by the time Lammers finally pulled to the curb of a pale green ranch house on Fargo Court in north Portland. A sweet-looking vintage Chevy sat parked alongside a middle-aged tow truck in the driveway. Lennox drove past the house and parked up the street alongside a row of arborvitae. She twisted around in her seat and watched Lammers get out of his car.
There are men in their fifties, men who take a stab at fitness, watch their fat and carbohydrate intake, men who try. They may not look young but they still look viable. Lammers wasn’t one of them. Lammers was one of those crack-in-the-ass guys ten months pregnant with a beer baby.
He stood in the driveway talking to his buddy, a skinny man with a gray ponytail. Ponytail popped the hood of the Chevy and the two gray-hairs peered inside. She got the shot with her Nikkor zoom telephoto 70-200mm super honking lens. She got another three butt shots of Lammers bent way over the car wrenching on something while Ponytail revved the engine. Here was the payoff for two days’ work.
Oh, but then it got better. Lammers, still bent over the engine, executed a half twist then fully extended his arm to signal higher and lower revs. The insurance company was going to love this. Two more pictures and she’d be over at Starbucks for a venti nonfat latte and the facilities.
She jotted Ponytail’s address in her notebook. Stuffed it back into her utility bag.
She heard some kind of yowling and snapped back in her seat in time to see Allan Lammers running toward her, roaring like a berserker. He waved a two-foot-long torque wrench over his head. She turned the key in the ignition about the time he pressed his big red face against her window.
“Get out of the car!” he yelled.
“Get out of the way!” she yelled back.
He yanked on her door handle, swung the wrench, and busted her side mirror right off. Took another swing and connected with the fender, the good one.
She popped the clutch and swung into the street. He jumped to the side, dropping the wrench. Once he was out of the way she hit the gas. Unbelievably, he began running alongside her truck. Lennox had to hand it to the guy; he ran pretty fast for an old fat dude. She reached for the camera with her right hand, driving with her left.
“Smile,” she said.
Three blocks from Ponytail’s house Lammers was a fat little speck in her rear-view mirror. She got to the intersection on Seventeenth and turned right, headed for MLK Boulevard.
In the few seconds before the crash she saw Ponytail’s tow truck barreling down the cross street. She got a quick look at his cattle guard seconds before the tow truck T-boned the Bronco. She wrenched sideways and slammed hard against the glove box before the seat belt caught her and jerked her back against the seat. The Bronco spun 180 degrees, jumped the curb, hitting a streetlight.
The windshield had shattered, covering Lennox in broken glass. Her ribs were messed up. Her passenger side door was caved in. Through the broken windows she could just make out the tow truck speeding like a mother three blocks ahead. No other traffic, no witnesses.
Sharp pain skewered her side when she went to retrieve her utility bag. She found it under the seat with the spilled yogurt and the playing cards. She fished out her phone. The driver’s side door cracked open just wide enough to squeeze out. With every shift of her body the safety glass crackled. She made it to the curb, sat down on someone’s front yard and dialed 911. She tried to shake the glass chips from her sleeve. It hurt too much to take a deep breath. The emergency dispatcher came on the line. Le
nnox gave her name and location. Hit-and-run, she told him.
It had started drizzling again before a black and white showed up. Officer Joe Maki, a cop she’d never seen before, squatted next to her and leveled a very young face at her. She handed him her license and registration. Water beaded on his jacket.
She told him how she was working for an insurance company and all about Allan Lammers. No, Lammers wasn’t the one who slammed into her, she told the cop; it was his friend. She didn’t have Ponytail’s name, but she had his address and the license number on the tow truck. The cop’s expression shifted from grave to graver.
“Do you need an ambulance, ma’am?”
She didn’t think so.
He trotted back to his squad car and got her a blanket. The drizzle turned to rain and his jacket darkened from the water. He told her he needed to call in her license. He’d call in a tow company for her. Was there one she preferred? The irony was completely lost on the young Officer Maki.
Lennox sat shivering in the rain and waited some more. She glanced at her watch. It was almost eleven. Her ribs were killing her. She wondered if she should get an x-ray.
When the officer returned to her car, his attitude, well, let’s just say it was like an altogether different cop who returned.
“Stand up, ma’am,” he said.
“What’s the matter?”
His eyes turned steely. They really did. “Can you stand up or are you too drunk?” he said. He pointed to the painted line that divided the street from the shoulder. “Do you see that line?”
“Of course,” she said.
“I want you to walk it.”
Her right leg and hip were growing stiff. She said, “I need to see a doctor.”
“Just walk the line.”
There was only one reason Lennox could think of why Officer Maki had turned from a mild-mannered cop into a prick. Same reason she’d been just short of harassed this whole last year. Maki had got hold of one of her fans at the Portland Police.
The wind picked up and blew the rain sideways. Officer Maki watched her the way a prison guard watches the exercise pen.
“Well?” she said. “Have I passed yet?”
“I’ll tell you when you’ve passed.”
She was wet through and the pain in her chest was a whole lot worse. Finally the tow truck pulled up. Maki handed her a ticket citing her with reckless driving. Added to the repair on the front axle and the bodywork, the fine, and the hike her insurance was bound to take, Lennox would be working the next two months just to break even. Merry freaking Christmas.
“Officer Maki.” She heard her voice jack up an octave. She took a breath and started over. “This is a hit-and-run. Do I need to go downtown with this?”
His face was set in hard lines. “You do that.”
Chapter 2
Friday night and every stool at the bar had a butt on it. Lennox gave her umbrella a shake, sending another stab of pain from her cracked rib. She let the front door of the Shanty close behind her as four waitresses loaded with fish platters maneuvered around the tables. The patrons, some in suits, others in jeans and polar fleece, munched on oyster crackers while they waited for their food. The whole place smelled of clam chowder and wet wool.
Cops hung out at the Shanty, leastways those who worked Portland’s east side. But the Shanty wasn’t just a cop bar; it served working class people from the Hollywood district plus folks up the hill in the old-money houses that lined the Alameda. Red, blue, and green Christmas lights outlined the back bar and a swag of gold garland hung over the order window.
Why was she still hanging out at a cop bar? They say an ex-cop is like an ex-Catholic: there is no ex. All that training becomes a part of you; it’s in your blood. It’s the eyes you see the world with. Even though she no longer worked for the Bureau, inside, Lennox was still a cop. And she wasn’t about to quit Friday night poker, the one sweet spot in her week.
As Lennox limped past the line of backs sitting at the bar she recognized that sonuvabitch, Fish, on the stool by the waitress stand. It’d only taken her a phone call to find out he was the one responsible for Officer Maki’s attitude. If Fish had his way, every new cop on the Bureau would learn about her. He swiveled on his stool and grinned at her.
“How’s it going, Cooper?” he said.
“Go fuck yourself,” she said.
He got to his feet and fell in step with her like they were friends.
“Get away from me,” she said.
He stopped midway down the bar, clapped his hand on a patrolman’s back. The cop turned, saw Lennox and gave Fish the high-five. Sieminski: another cop who hated her guts.
Sieminski nudged the cop next to him. The guy glanced back and said something. Sieminski laughed, the kind of nasty laugh a guy makes when he’s heard a dirty joke. The same laugh she’d been hearing since the Bureau fired her.
She left Fish to bond with Sieminski, wishing both of them all kinds of bad luck; silently, she didn’t want her butt kicked. Dodging the waitresses, she made her way to the back room.
Originally the back room was for billiards, but the space proved too cramped. The pine paneling still showed pockmarks from pool sticks wielded back in the sixties. Lennox never heard when it was that they installed the poker table, but by the looks of the green felt, it had to have been decades ago.
Her best friend, Ham, swept up a game of solitaire when he spotted her and stood, his arms stretched for a hug.
“Watch the cracked rib,” she said. “Where is everybody?”
“You’re the first,” he said. “Did the check from Fidelity come?”
Old Ham kept better track of her accounts receivable than she did. She shook her head.
His arms folded around her and he patted her gently on the back. She pressed her face against his UC Berkeley warm-up jacket. The top of her head reached under his chin. He wore his brown hair short, his beard clipped close to his chin. His beard was going gray, which bugged Lennox more than it did him. It was weird to see a friend going gray when she’d known him since they were teenagers back in the Berkeley days when he used to date her roommate. Sophomore year he taught Lennox five-card stud. It’s hard not to love what you’re good at, and she was an ace at telling whether a guy was bluffing or holding by the way he jiggled his leg or tugged at his lower lip. From then on, Fridays were poker night.
Long story short, both Ham and Lennox moved to Portland ten years ago. Ham, a forensic accountant, had married a tax attorney who didn’t mind taking herself off to the movies every Friday night. This December found Lennox playing cards for a lot higher stakes than their school days. Which was fine so long as her checking account wasn’t on an intravenous drip.
Ham drew out his wallet, pulled out a fold of bills and tried to press them into her hand.
She pushed his hand back.
Fish walked in. “Am I interrupting something?” It was hard for Fish to look innocent when his hairline reached to the bridge of his nose.
“I don’t know.” She turned to Ham. “Is Sasquatch interrupting something?”
“Play nice,” Ham said.
“I am,” she said.
The rest of the gang, Jerry, Fulin, and Sarge, trailed behind the waitress into the back room, Fulin doing the talking. “So he says do I want to be his wife.”
“Fulin, man, your hair’s down to your ass; what do you expect?” Jerry said. “I’ll start with a pint of Black Butte, Katy.”
Fulin hung his leather jacket on a wall hook by the door. He looked more like a rock star than a parole officer. Underneath his jacket, he wore a tight red tee shirt with a butterfly beaded across the chest.
Jerry shook his head. “He wears his girlfriend’s clothes and wonders why honest men mistake him for a fairy.”
“I like it,” Lennox said.
Jerry smacked his lips. “You’d fill it out. Listen gorgeous, you want representation at traffic court?”
“I heard she was drunk,” Fish said.
Fish had been trying to transfer to vice for years. His theory as to why he was passed over time after time was that the brass disliked Catholics. And it was true he got a raft of abuse from the other cops for attaching a magnetic Jesus fish to his squad car. But the real reason he never got promoted to vice? No one wanted to work with the prick.
Ham shuffled the cards, the laminate snapped and Lennox’s heart beat a little faster. Her Bronco in the body shop, her mortgage, Christmas coming and Fidelity Insurance forty-three days in arrears, everything she stressed over faded when she heard the sound of cards riffling.
Each of them threw in a five-buck white chip. Ham dealt two cards down and the next card up. Lennox stalled until everyone else had seen their cards before she peeked. Some people rubbed a lucky coin or wore the same gnarly shirt every game— with her it was the peek.
Sweet. She drew a pair of fours. King up, she led the betting and threw in another white chip. Everyone stayed in.
Ham honked mightily into a large handkerchief and dealt another card.
Fulin raised.
“You got three of a kind, Butterfly Boy?” Jerry said.
Fulin kept his mouth shut but leaned forward slightly to release his trapped hair. Classic Fulin tell; he was bluffing.
Lennox’s cell phone vibrated against the pocket of her sweater. She ignored it and met Fulin’s raise. Everyone stayed in. Ham dealt the fourth card. She paired her king. The lights over the table reflected off Sarge’s bald head as he hunched over his hand. Translation: he had zip to zero. Then look at Fish being cool. What an asshole, sipping on his beer, stacking his chips in neat little piles. She so wanted to take him down. He was holding, she knew he was, but what? He had a pair of deuces on the table.