A Hard Light

by Wendy Hornsby

  “My dear Margot,” she said, her voice rich with affection. She stroked my face, a quick cool line drawn with a long finger. And then, abruptly, she was all business again. “I should pack.”

  Mike received a pat on the arm, then Mother took her coffee and went up the back stairs. When we heard her bedroom door close, Mike said, “Quite a gal.”

  “One of a kind,” I said. “What’s on your agenda for the day?”

  “Questioning another one of the kids in the Pedro case. Her mother is supposed to bring her in.”

  “Have any of the fathers shown up?” I asked.

  “Nope. Don’t expect any, either.” He shrugged. “What are your plans?”

  “Depends on you.” I stacked cereal bowls. “The location shoot in Wilmington is obviously off.”

  He said, “Mm-hmm,” as he wiped up a milk spill. “Maybe you can stay home, at least until the rain lets up. Stick around to see your mom off.”

  “I don’t think so. Mike?” I caught his hand. “The rain woke me up last night and I couldn’t go back to sleep.”

  “Uh-oh.” He pulled me against him. “So, you lay there thinking, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Inspiration happened.”

  “Sure did,” I said.

  “Why do I suddenly have a sense of impending doom?”

  I bumped him with my hip.

  “And?” he said.

  “What’s the possibility I can tape your initial interrogation sessions with this girl you have coming in?”

  “We tape all the interviews. You can listen to the tapes. No problem. I told you that a long time ago.”

  “No,” I said. “I want to be in there with you.”

  He frowned, his eyes narrowed to those dark, shiny slits, cop slits. “Run that by me again.”

  “I want to come into the interrogation room and videotape you questioning these little murderers for the first time.”

  “Too many legal implications in that and too many layers of permissions to get through. So far everyone has agreed to talk to you at some point. Isn’t that enough?”

  “No. I want them before they get their stories straight. I want them scared. And I want their mothers.”

  When he started to shake his head, I put my hand against his cheek before he could say anything I’d have to argue him out of. I said, “This fits too well for you to say no to me. Khanh gave us a family fragmented by one sort of war. Now I want what you have, families fragmented by war of another sort. See the thread?”

  “No.”

  “No, you can’t see it? Or, no, I can’t do it?”

  He studied me in his inquisitor’s way. And then a slow smile crossed his face, an almost shy sort of expression. “You just can’t stay away from me, can you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “If you want to spend the day with me, I can think of a hundred better places than the interrogation room.”

  “I’m serious, Mike.”

  “Okay.” He handed me the coffeepot so he could wipe the table under it. “I’ll talk to the lieutenant and see what he says. But you only. No Guido. No crew. Just so you know, I’m only agreeing to this so I can keep track of you.”

  “Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater,” I said.

  “It’s not like that and you know it. It’s just, it seems to me this world has pretty much gotten out of hand, Maggie. When I look at all that rain outside, it makes me think, what if God has decided it’s time for another forty-day flood to clear out all the sinners again? If I were him, I’d have cleaned house a long time ago. I’m getting a little nervous.”

  “I don’t recall God giving us any instructions to build an ark, Noah. If this is the great flood, we must not have made the nonsinners cut.”

  “If nothing else, then, we’ll go to the bottom together.”

  Mike had his back to me, putting the milk and margarine into the refrigerator. He turned and winked at me, a vague sadness in his expression. “You know it’s a juvenile case. It can be rough, listening to what they have to say.”

  “I know.”

  On the radio, the weatherman was saying that the National Weather Service satellite had picked up three large storms backed up across the Pacific. “Expect intermittent heavy rainfall through the weekend,” the reporter said.

  Mike moved the salt and pepper shakers and the napkin holder back into the middle of the scrubbed oak table. “What did I tell you?” he said. “This little sprinkle is just the beginning.”

  The front doorbell chimed. I said, “I’ll get it.”

  My mother called out to me from the upstairs landing as I crossed to the door. I couldn’t understand what she said. I called back, “Are you expecting someone?”

  I had my head cocked, trying to hear her answer, when I opened the door. When I turned, my focus was aimed straight ahead, expecting to look into the eyes of whoever was there. What I saw instead was the shiny, 24-carat gold tie tack of Ian Scott MacGowen, Esq.

  CHAPTER

  7

  “Tell me it isn’t true.” Tanned and handsome, Scotty had his ain’t-I-swell mask firmly in place. I didn’t invite him inside where he might feel comfortable enough to let the mask slip. Rage en croute, his legal partner called him: rage contained only by a pastry shell. One hand in a trouser pocket, like a GQ version of success, he said, “Word is, you sold the house.”

  “Casey isn’t here.” Showing up unannounced, Scotty caught me off guard, made me feel vulnerable, so I put up a front of my own. The greatest boon of divorce from Scotty was that I never again had to stick around for one of his tantrums. I kept one hand on the edge of the door, ready to shut him out at the first word he uttered above a normal, conversational tone. “Casey has been worried about you and your wife has been calling.”

  “You should have given me right of first refusal.” Still, he smiled. “As a courtesy.”

  “As a courtesy? Suddenly you want the San Francisco house? Why?”

  “Why?” The tone said any idiot should know. I did not know.

  Some men get better looking as they age, and Scotty was one of them. He was a tall man, six-six, and big boned. Extra middle-aged padding softened his angularity, made him seem less intimidating than I remembered. Crow’s-feet, little wattles under his square jaw, a comfortable roundness under his belt, silver at the temples—Hollywood would easily cast him as a judge or a senator. Typecasting: Scotty was one of the most notorious litigators on the West Coast until he moved to Denver with wife number two, where he became the terror of the Rocky Mountain State.

  “Where are you staying?” I asked him, ready to close the door. “I’ll have Casey call you.”

  “I’m at the Four Seasons,” he said. “You haven’t answered my question. Did you sell?”

  “I haven’t even seen the offer. But I’ll probably accept it. Max says it’s clean.”

  Scotty flinched and lost his smile, but wasn’t yelling yet. “If I ever thought that you would just piss the place away, I would never have let you have it.”

  “You let me have what?”

  “The house.”

  “You let me have the mortgage and the earthquake repair bills and the property taxes. Is there some part of that you want to lay claim to now?” I didn’t raise my voice or even put a sarcastic twist on it. “You let me have the house because that made it easier for you to turn your back on Casey and start over again. Which reminds me. Linda is worried. You should call her.”

  I recognized the hard glaze that dropped over his eyes, the air he hauled in to fuel an impending explosion. He hissed, “Don’t tell me what I did or did not do. Or what I need to do.”

  “I’ll tell you this, Scotty. If the sale falls through, I’ll have my attorney call you. Be warned: I’m only accepting cash offers.”

  The mask was gone. His breathing grew noisy, his face flushed, sweat shone on his brow—primal, like a man near the point of orgasm. But I knew from experience that the only ejaculation was going to be a stream of inve
ctive and threats. He took a step forward. “We have to talk. Now. Let me come inside, I’m getting wet.”

  I held my ground long enough to say, “Casey is the only subject you and I have to talk about, Scotty. Anything else, call my lawyer. Now, go call Linda.” I closed the door, leaving him outside in the rain.

  “I tried to warn you.” Mom, carrying her toothbrush, had been eavesdropping from the living room. “I saw him drive up.”

  “Damn him.” I snapped on the dead bolt.

  “Think he’ll do something, Margot?”

  “Something like screw up the sale? He can’t. I have legal title. There’s nothing he can do.”

  “Nothing?” With the lift of one eyebrow, Mom expressed more sarcasm than anything I had said. “Scotty?”

  “He doesn’t want the house, he just wants someone to mess with. My bet is he’s breaking up with Linda.”

  “They have small children.” Sounded like disbelief; in my mother’s world people with small children did not break up. “What about the children?”

  I said, “What about the children, indeed.”

  “Was that who I think it was?” Mike walked over to the front window and drew back the drapes. The three of us stood shoulder to shoulder and watched Scotty climb into a chauffeur-driven Town Car and disappear into the deluge.

  “So, Noah.” I closed the drapes.

  “Yeah?”

  “Suppose Scotty thought he had an invitation for this boat ride you have planned?”

  Mike chuckled. “If he did, he was wrong.”

  The night before, I had driven home in one of the studio’s big Ram vans so that I could go straight down to Wilmington without driving all the way out to the Valley first. It was a good thing I had the van. Neither my car nor Michael’s little compact would have made it downtown that morning without stalling and leaving us stranded. We took the van.

  A trip that normally takes twenty minutes during rush hour stretched over a harrowing hour. Mike drove and I kibitzed the entire way: “Fair Oaks looks flooded, try Orange Grove.” “There’s a tree down in the street ahead, turn right at this alley. Now.” When he dropped me off at the downtown library on Hope Street, we were both short-tempered and happy to split up, even if only for a short time.

  Mike’s partner, Cecil, had volunteered to pick up the girl suspect and her mother in South Central. They weren’t due at Parker Center for another hour, meaning they probably wouldn’t arrive for two. Mike wanted that time to get approval from his lieutenant for me to shoot the interview, and he wanted me out of the way while he groveled. I had some library research to do, so the schedule worked out all right.

  A few years ago, an arsonist set a fire in the stacks of the city’s downtown library, destroying the original old art deco landmark. Out of the ashes rose a brand-new postmodern structure, part deco, part Dr. Seuss, part neo-mall, that is now the pride of the city center.

  On that rainy morning, the library teemed with patrons, many of them obviously homeless folks looking for shelter. I rode the long central escalator up to the main floor and waited for a turn at one of the card catalogue computers.

  An hour and a half later, with much help from several librarians and a lovely woman who attached herself to me because she thought I was an old friend of hers named Wilma—she also conversed with a mutual friend that only she could see or hear—I had several good volumes on Southeast Asian art and a list of galleries in the area that specialized in Asian works. I also had a printout of news stories culled from the Internet about home invasion robberies.

  Mike paged me while I was in the main-floor bookstore, talking a clerk into giving me a plastic bag to wrap my books in. I found a public phone near the security desk and called him back.

  “You’re cleared,” Mike said. “The lieutenant says you can sit in on the interview, and you can have a camera. But if at some point he decides you have to leave, you gotta go.”

  “I can live with that,” I said.

  “Then swim on over.”

  CHAPTER

  8

  The girl was young, big, hard looking. Worldly. What impressed me most about her as she slouched in her chair in the hallway outside the interrogation room was that she seemed more annoyed than scared.

  Her mother sat next to her, but with her chair turned purposely so that her back was to her daughter while she went over paperwork with Mike and his partner, Cecil Renfrew. Other detectives on the third floor walked around them, hardly bothering to notice the unfolding drama, the way water pours around boulders sticking up in the middle of a rushing stream.

  I snapped a couple of Polaroids of the girl and her mother to check the light, and neither of them reacted. When the videocamera came up to my shoulder, though, the girl balked.

  “Why you doing that?” she demanded.

  “You signed off on the video,” Cecil snapped at her.

  “Not me,” she snapped right back.

  “You’re a minor. Your mother signed for you.” Cecil was awfully harsh with her. “Just keep still until we’re ready for you.”

  Mike glanced at me, embarrassed, I thought, by his partner’s tone. He said, “We’ll be in that first room behind you, Ms. MacGowen, if you want to go on inside and get set up.”

  I wanted to tape the girl’s parting with her mother because I thought it would be telling. But I went ahead as Mike suggested. The lieutenant had made it clear that he was uneasy about my being present at all until he had an official okay from the city attorney. This was a juvenile case, he reminded me. He was all for a Scared Straight approach, but juveniles have special protections. My toehold in the interrogation process, as he defined it, was so tenuous that I decided to be just real cooperative. For the time being.

  I stopped at the open door of the secretary’s office to watch a special news broadcast of the storm’s ravages on her little TV. Out in the Valley the Tujunga Wash, normally a muddy trickle, had become a tumbling river powerful enough to carry along uprooted trees, an Edison repair crew’s truck, a horse, and five small houses. An encampment of homeless men and their dogs had been washed out. At least one of the men had drowned, another clung to the underside of a fragment of washed-out bridge, waiting for the water to rise another foot and sweep him away. A rescue helicopter hovered over him, fighting both the rain and high winds as a fireman tried to persuade the frightened man to let go of the bridge and grasp the dangling lifeline.

  The secretary looked up and saw me watching her TV. She turned up the volume a notch for me. “Can you believe this rain? They’ve started calling it the hundred-year storm. The heaviest rainfall on record for a single day. I want to go pick up my kids from school, but the lieutenant says to stay put. He says they’re better off at school than in a car. He’s probably right, but I’m getting nervous.”

  “Me, too,” I said. “Mike’s talking about building an ark.”

  She laughed. “Mike would do it, too.”

  The rescue squad got the homeless man tethered to the lifeline and flew him to high ground, like a bundle of rags swinging below the chopper.

  I said so long and walked on down the hall, wondering if the rescue would have any influence on the man’s life. He was safe for the moment, but where was he going to sleep at night?

  The interrogation room Mike sent me to was about the size of a broom closet, barely big enough for its scarred Formica table and two old oak chairs. The acoustic tiles on the walls and ceiling didn’t block very much outside noise, but they protected any conversation going on inside fairly well.

  My microphone set off feedback squeal in the room’s hidden sound recording system. From somewhere down the hall I heard an anguished, “Cut that out,” probably from the poor guy who was setting up a new tape for the interrogation. I laid my mike on a parallel range and taped it down. Then I ran a quick visual check: The overhead fluorescent light gave the scene a harsh, industrial quality that I liked. A hard light that would show every line and flaw on the subjects’ faces.

>   When the door opened, I started the camera running, backing into the far corner as Mike and the girl walked in.

  “This is the setup I told you about,” Mike said, pulling out her chair and pointing at the seat, meaning she should sit. “You know that everything you say is being recorded. Your mother signed the paper.”

  She looked at me and swallowed hard. After that, both of them seemed to forget I was there.

  Sitting across from the girl, interview forms on the table in front of him, Mike began to talk. His tone was flat, not friendly, nor unfriendly. The girl was nervous, popped her gum, fussed with the fan of stiff hair that crested up from her forehead, couldn’t decide what to do with her hands. Mike spent no time reassuring her or helping her to get comfortable.

  “Okay.” Mike took the cap off his pen. “What’s your last name?”

  “Woodson.” The girl watched his hand as he wrote.

  “First name?”

  “Cantina.”

  “They just call you Tina, don’t they?”

  “Most people do.”

  “Middle name?”

  The name sounded like, “Champagne.”

  Mike glanced up. “How do you spell it?”

  “C-H-A-M-P-A-N-G-E.”

  “That’s how your momma spells it?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Mike looked at what he had written, then he shrugged and went on. “What is your address, where your momma lives?”

  “Four-one-oh-five. It’s on Mayfair Drive.” She rolled the street name over again as if unsure. “Yeah. Mayfair Drive. But that’s not where I stay. I stay at my sister Daquie’s house.”

  “Your momma’s your legal guardian, so her place is your legal address.” His hand moved down a line. “How tall are you?”

  “Five-eight.”

  “How much do you weigh?”

  “One-thirty-two.”

  “What’s your birthday again?”

  She gave him a date in May, and the year. He paused, did the math, and said, “That makes you thirteen.”

  Tina nodded.

  “You need to say the answer for the tape. Was that yes?”