Lily had put up a pot of coffee, and not wanting to wait for it to perk, she stuck her coffee cup under the drip pan and removed the pot. Coffee started leaking out onto the counter, and she mopped it up with a paper towel. Shana tossed the banana peel under the sink in the trash can and picked up a sponge and began cleaning the counter.
“But what if I want to see someone…you know, a man…go on a date? Is that going to make you sick too?” Lily said the words but didn’t envision it actually occurring after the night before. All the same, the revelation that John had been seeing someone for some time made her wish that she had given him a swift kick that morning. All the guilt he’d laid on her and he had been carrying on behind her back. She promised herself that she would follow him and spy on him the next time he went out, give him a dose of his own medicine.
Shana tossed the sponge into the sink and threw up her hands. “Dad’s gonna be dating…you’re gonna be dating…shit…guess I’ll start dating too. We’ll be the dating family.”
Shana never used profanity. Thinking she was upset, Lily said, “We’re all only human. Everyone needs someone in their life, even if it’s just for friendship’s sake.”
“I’m not angry, Mom,” she said, smiling. She even walked over and hugged Lily from behind around the waist. “You’re pretty, Mom, real pretty, and you’re a lot younger than Dad.” Lily turned to face her and her eyebrows arched and her eyes sparkled. “All the guys are gonna want to go out with you. I just know Dad’s going to bring some boring old lady over here and she’s gonna try to be my mom. Besides, Dad babies me to death. He’s always hanging on me, kissing me, treating me like I’m still a little kid, his baby doll or something.” She grimaced. “I can’t stand it. I’m not a baby anymore.”
She looked Lily straight in the eye. More was said with that look between them than words could ever say. Lily knew exactly what she was feeling, knew it would be a long time before she would be comfortable with any man, even her father. Even though she was certain that John’s behavior was just fatherly love and nothing inappropriate, she knew Shana couldn’t tolerate it any longer. “No, you’re not a baby anymore, Shana. You’re a bona fide young woman.” Lily felt tears about to fall. She placed one finger under each eye in an attempt to hold them back. “I’m really, really happy that you want to live with me. I’ll do my very best to make you happy.”
“Ventura is so cool, Mom, with the beach and all. Let’s drive over there today and see where we want to live. Okay?”
Thinking of Richard and the cool breezes and towering trees in the foothills, the feeling she got when she’d been there of being far removed from the city below, Lily knew just where she wanted to look.
“Your dad will have to sell this house. I don’t think he can afford it without my salary.”
“So, why does he need such a big place? What’s he gonna do anyway? Let his girlfriend move in here. I don’t want to move back here, not ever.”
Lily opened her arms and Shana walked into them. “I love you so much,” she said, holding her tightly. “Just your saying that you want to live with me, well, it’s all I ever hoped for. You can’t possibly know how much I needed to hear this.”
Shana pulled back and brushed her mother’s hair off her face. “I know a lot more than you think, Mom. Everything’s going to be great. Just you wait and see.”
CHAPTER 19
Sunday was visiting day at the Ventura County Jail, and Manny Hernandez was standing in a long line, waiting to sign in, have the metal detector waved over his body and be patted down by one of the jailers. Thursday they had buried his brother. Not much of a funeral, and even that cost enough that his father had to get a loan at the produce company where he worked. Their mother had split years ago, when Manny was a baby and Bobby about six years old.
Finally getting into the visiting area, Manny took a seat in one of the cubicles and picked up the phone to speak with the inmate, while they looked at each other’s faces through the thick glass. The prisoner started jabbering in Spanish.
“I dunno what you’re fucking saying, bro,” Manny said. The man knew he didn’t understand Spanish but was always forgetting. His father knew only a few words himself, having been raised in the States.
“You not spose to be here, man. Like they check the sign-in to see who’s comin’ in here to see who.”
“My brother is fucking dead an’ the cops are all over my ass. Someways they found out bout Carmen. It’s bad shit, man. Bad shit. You heard?”
“I hear.” The man’s face twisted with menace and rage, threatening. “I hear you fucking sleepin’ with the cops, man. You gonna be dead meat. That’s what I hear.”
Manny got up to leave. “I don’t got to take shit from no one,” he yelled. The man behind the glass stood and put both his palms on the window, jerking his head for Manny to return. Manny took his time, shuffling his feet. Then he picked up the phone again.
“You ain’t heard nuthin’ bout what I say. Not saying shit, man. Not shit. You the ones inside, not me. You ask round. Some skinny white guy blowed Bobby away and I want his ass, you hear me? That man’s dead I find him. Dead. You get the word or you’ll hear plenty.”
Manny threw the phone receiver in the metal bin used to pass papers and things to the inmates. The noise was loud enough to attract the attention of the jailer. He was around the corner in seconds.
“Dropped it, man,” Manny said, holding his hands up as though he were under arrest and to show he wasn’t concealing anything. “Just dropped it, man.” With that, he left.
When Manny pulled up to his house, he saw an unmarked police unit at the curb and Cunningham motioning for him to come over. “Motherfucking detective,” he yelled, squeezing his fingers on the steering wheel until the knuckles turned white. “Making my skin crawl. Everywhere I go, every time I take a piss, I see this mother.”
Slamming the car door, he walked to the police unit and stuck his head in the passenger window. “What you want now? It’s Sunday, man. I just got back from mass for my brother. You harassing me, comin’ here all the time.”
Cunningham sneered, flicking the ends of his mustache with his fingers. “And who are you going to complain to, Manny, my boy? Just who is going to be real concerned about me harassing you? The chief maybe, or the mayor?”
“So whatta you want now? Wanna smell my dick and see if I took a piss today?”
“You lied to me about Carmen Lopez, and you can’t imagine what it does to me when people lie to me.” Cunningham reached inside his sharkskin suit and pulled out the .38 Smith & Wesson he carried there. He held the gun in his hands and played with it, checking the chamber, taking the edge of his jacket and wiping it down. “I just fucking hate to be lied to by jack shits like you. You said you had never seen Carmen before that night and only picked her up for a cruise. Well, that wasn’t true, was it?”
Manny started blinking. Sweat became visible on his brow and upper lip. He slapped the top of the patrol car with his palms. “So I was with her a few times fore she moved. Lotsa guys were with her. That ain’t no crime.”
“Word is that Bobby was hot for her—real hot for her—and maybe he got real pissed when she decided to clean up her act and started dating a high school guy.” Cunningham replaced the gun in the shoulder holster.
“Fuck you,” Manny said. “Bobby’s dead and she’s dead. They got the guys who wasted her. Why don’t you fucking find the guy who killed my brother? Fuck you.”
Manny turned and went into the house. He knew even Cunningham had his limits and would not follow. Things were getting heavy, real heavy, and Manny was getting scared.
CHAPTER 20
The line at Inn-Out Burgers was about twelve cars deep, but Cunningham didn’t care. Sunday night was diet night at his house, and he made it a habit to eat out instead of going home as he normally did. His wife, Sharon, as well as all three of their kids, had a tendency to gain weight, so diet night consisted of plain chicken breasts cooked on the gr
ill, with salad and a baked potato without butter. Just thinking of those little dry pieces of meat made him want to gag. His mouth was watering and his stomach roaring for a double-double with cheese and an order of fresh-cooked fries.
While waiting in line, he reviewed all the information he had collected. As far as a lead on the homicide of Bobby Hernandez, he had little or nothing. When one of the little Mexican ladies on the block had called the station and advised a Spanish-speaking officer that she had copied down the license plate of the red compact car, he’d known right away that it was too good to be true. She insisted that the plate was correct, saying she’d checked it several times while the car was parked right in front of her house, a few doors down from the murder scene. Said she got up early to go to work, and her kitchen window looked onto the street. Seeing the car there, parked with the engine running, she smelled trouble and wrote down the license plate just in case. But the lead went nowhere. So far everything had been a dead end. Even the National Crime Information Center in Washington, where he had faxed the composite, and the FBI had no one who was a close enough match to follow through on.
He had a make on the weapon and two slug casings from the scene, but no prints and no weapon. He’d played with the thought of a professional hit, but there was nothing to substantiate it. A professional would have known the first shot was the kill shot and never stayed around, risking apprehension, to fire again. Also, the Hernandez brothers were just not big enough at anything, and in Oxnard, if you wanted somebody dead, it could be had for as little as five hundred bucks and you’d have your choice of shooters. They might not be pros, but they’d stand in line for the job.
The only thing that crossed his mind was the boy who had been murdered with Carmen Lopez, Peter McDonald. If the Hernandez brothers had committed that crime and the family had learned the truth without reporting it, possibly they could have hired someone to murder Hernandez, or even one of the family members themselves had sought revenge. The compact car and the fact that the killer was distinctly Anglo could support such a premise.
He finally made it through the line and got his little sack containing his double-double and fries. He parked and popped the can on his diet soda, purchased at Stop n’ Go earlier. He liked to save pennies whenever possible. While he sank his teeth into the hot burger, he made a mental note to call the detectives handling the Lopez-McDonald murders in the morning and find out what he could on the McDonald family.
Officially it was not his case, occurring about twenty minutes away in Ventura, but no one would mind, not one little bit, if he could put something together on this baby. And Manny Hernandez was dirty, as dirty as they come. Not only that, he thought, he was running scared, real scared. One thing Cunningham had a righteous nose for was fear, and he could smell Manny a city block away.
As far as the disappearance of Patricia Barnes, the fat hooker that Hernandez had been dismissed of trying to rape and kidnap, there were no leads whatsoever. No body had been found, even unidentified, and he had checked the entire state. The van had turned up hairs matching those on one of her brushes supplied by her sister, but they already knew she’d been in the van. There were no blood stains or any other evidence in the van or the house that could suggest a murder. Barnes more than likely would waltz in one day in a month or a year and claim her kids. She probably just took a hike. Of course, she could be buried somewhere and her body might never be found. Old Ethel Owen was still out there somewhere. Never know, he thought. That was another benefit of the job: suspense. He thrived on it.
Back at the station, he went to the records counter and seeing Melissa, he smiled, relieved that the bitch was off today. “God, Melissa,” he said across the counter, “I’m stuffed like a pig.” He extended his stomach and opened his jacket to prove it. “Want me to get you something to eat?”
Melissa placed her cigarette on the edge of the ashtray and sneered at Cunningham. “Thanks but no thanks,” she said, bending back down over whatever she was working on and ignoring him. When she picked up the cigarette, he spotted the calluses on her right thumb from writing. She was the best damn worker in the department. The only problem was the girl weighed only about eighty-five pounds dripping wet. She was either anorexic or on speed. No one had figured out which, and everyone wondered.
Melissa’s father was an ancient, decaying ex-Hell’s Angel, crippled now and in a wheelchair with some rare illness stemming from years of drug abuse. For such a low-life background, the young woman made every attempt to present herself with a degree of class. She wore inexpensive but stylish clothes and wore her dark hair swept back in a sleek knot at the base of her neck. Lately she had become so emaciated that she had to sit on a pillow, no flesh whatsoever on her tailbone.
“Melissa darling,” he said, “I have a little project for you and only you. You know you’re the best there is in my eyes.”
She didn’t smile, but she did get up and walk to the counter, leaving the ever present cigarette smoldering in the ashtray. Being sweet-talked was old hat, as she did extra work for half the department. The calluses came from writing patrol officers’ reports from their own scribbled notes when they were too lazy to write them.
“I have this murder case with nothing, absolutely nothing,” he said. “All I have is this license number, and it’s got to be an error.”
She looked up at him with her big, soulful eyes and waited for him to fish the number out of his file. “So, you want me to run it with every possible combination. What are we looking for exactly?”
“We’re looking for a compact car, red, and I’ll take anything with a registered owner in the local area, say a radius of fifty miles or so. Then run D.M.V. for the owner and if it looks even halfway possible, let me see it. Also, check all combinations on anything stolen in the past week or so.”
“See you around Christmas, Bruce. That’s how long it’s going to take for this little job.”
She took the paper and returned to her desk, slipping it under her desk blotter. She might act annoyed, but he knew she loved these kinds of projects. Pity, he thought, navigating his big frame down the hall to the detective bureau. She would’ve probably made the best cop the department had ever seen, but there weren’t that many that weighed only eighty-five pounds, not yet anyway. Just then a little man in uniform passed him and he shook his head. As hard as he tried, he just couldn’t get used to the munchkins, as he called them. When he had entered this line of work, it had been a world of giants, jock straps, and balls. They were all big and brave then, the town heroes. Now it was midgets, in more than physical stature, men and women who had to resort to brutality and force to make themselves feel superior, to maintain control. Because of a few L. A. cops, and a population that was morally bankrupt, half the city had been burned down in the riots, and thousands of people were homeless and out of work. Shit like this just didn’t happen in Omaha. There was crime, but what was going on around here was madness, moral decay, the end of the line. People were becoming desperate. They had no heroes, no warriors, no protectors, no one left to draw the line. When the cops didn’t even know who the good guys were anymore, it was a sad day to be sure.
Yep, he thought, dropping into his chair and swinging his feet on top of the desk, the job just wasn’t the same anymore. Trouble was, the fucking world just wasn’t the same anymore. Might be getting high time to take out the pencil and paper again and try to find the road out before it was too late, he told himself, before he too was sucked into the sewer with the rest of the rats.
CHAPTER 21
After spending the afternoon looking at houses in Ventura, Lily took Shana out to dinner and a movie at her insistence. In the dark theater, she sat and stared at the screen, unable to follow the film. Once they were home and Shana in her room with the door shut, she asked John to discuss something with her in the backyard.
The back door creaked on its hinges as John stepped outside. Lily was sitting in the dark, waiting. There was a full moon and she could see
him clearly, her eyes tracking him until he made himself comfortable in the lounge chair.
“So what do you want to talk about?” he said, stretching and yawning.
She sprang from the chair, stood over him, and brought her hand across his face as hard as she could, listening to the loud slap. “You had the unmitigated gall to hit me and order me to move out of this house when it was you…you’re the one who has been cheating behind my back. If it wasn’t for Shana, I’d get a court order and have you physically removed. Do you hear me?”
“I hear you,” he said, standing and starting to return to the house.
Lily grabbed the back of his shirt and pulled it. “Don’t you dare walk away…don’t you dare. If you hadn’t forced me to move out, Shana would’ve never been raped and I would never be living this nightmare. You’re the one responsible, not me.”
Once she let go of his shirt, he faced her, moonlight reflecting off the whites of his eyes. “And you, you’re going to look me in the eye and tell me that the other night was the first time you ever cheated on me. What do you take me for, a fool? You’re a slut. You’ve always been a slut. You may be a hot-shot attorney, but you’re nothing but a slut.”
The back door of the neighbors’ house opened, and both Lily and John turned. He moved closer to Lily and lowered his voice. “Now the whole neighborhood is going to know what’s going on in this house.”
Lily felt his warm breath on her face. “Just tell me one thing, John. How can I be a slut when I’ve only slept with a few men in my life and one of them raped me?”
“You know what I think? I think you just fabricated that whole stupid story about your grandfather to cover up the fact that you weren’t a virgin. I’ve always thought that.”
She was stunned. Letting her body drop to the lawn chair, she laced her fingers through her hair and stared at the ground. She wasn’t married to this man, she told herself. There was no way she could have lived all these years with this man, slept in his bed, shared his life, given birth to his child. She listened as he entered the house and shut the door behind him. The train had finally derailed and the cars were all overturned. All that remained was the baggage.
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