I gave it to him. But it seemed strictly pro forma that he wrote it down.
After leaving the station I took the Santa Monica Freeway all the way to the beach and drove to Venice to watch the moon come out.
She loved the moon.
She loved it most when it was big and round and looming over the ocean, throwing silver streaks on the water. And the way it cast light over L.A., the cool softness of it, an illumination to mute the hard edges of night and the city.
Once she said it reminded her of the night-light she had in her room as a child. It was round and glowy and plugged into the wall, and when she woke up from a bad dream she’d stare at it until she felt right again, safe. Then she’d go back to sleep, knowing her light would be there in the morning, waiting for her.
She thought that’s what you needed in the city—a big night-light in the sky, because there’s so much unseen, streets of bad shadows, and you need something to stare at until you feel right again. Safe.
She even said I made her feel safe.
Alone in the night and the city, I heard myself whispering her name, over and over and over.
Downtown LA
Southeast Division
12
TWO DAYS LATER I worked up the guts to return to the office. It was the Friday before Christmas, so it would be light work, and everybody would be in a good mood. Good enough, I hoped, that I wouldn’t have to talk to anybody about it, the incident, the loss. I didn’t want a lot of well-meaning, tight-lipped, understanding nods.
So I came in through the back way, seeing only Nelson Richards, one of the partners who outworked everybody else in the firm. He gave me a well-meaning, tight-lipped, understanding nod. I gave him half a wave and shot down to my office. It felt foreign, something to be preserved in a museum. Future gawkers could walk by and see the authentic abode of a once alive person who practiced law.
I tried to get back in the saddle, as they say. Churning through piled up e-mails, I found out that work doesn’t make you forget, not this soon.
A little before ten, Al bounded in after a quick knock on the door. “Welcome back, dude,” he said, arms akimbo like a televangelist on speed.
“I’m not all here yet,” I said.
“Your face, man.”
“Shut it, will you?”
“It’ll come back to ugly in no time.” He sat in a chair, loping one leg over the arm. “What was it Bukowski said? ‘It all begins and ends here, in the moment’.”
“Bukowski was a beer-soaked yutz.”
“Not a bad idea. Let’s grab a pitcher and get hammered.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Best thing for you. Bring you back to a resemblance of normal.”
“Al, you don’t have to work so hard on me. I’ll come around.”
I was not at all confident this was true.
“Dude, I know it hurts. The fact that you’re here now is, like, inhuman.”
“What?”
“Not like mutants from Planet X inhuman. Wait. Superhuman, how’s that? Whatever. Just thought getting back to a couple of drinks after work would be nice. The old routine.”
“Another time.”
“Your call.” He flicked something off his pants. “So I had a phone conversation with Lea Edwards, covering your cute little keister.”
“Yeah? What about it?”
“Just doing you a favor. You remember she’s coming in today?”
Truth be told, I hadn’t been thinking about the case at all. Jacqueline’s death was all over my mind.
I quickly checked my calendar. There it was. Giving me about an hour to prepare.
“You’re a saint, Al. I don’t care what your mother says.”
“Kiss my—”
“Good-bye, Al.”
13
DR. LEA EDWARDS was beautiful in that classy Lauren Bacall sort of way. Also formidable intellectually. Bachelor’s, master’s, and PhD from Harvard. Danforth Award winner as one of Harvard’s top teaching fellows.
Author of ten books, highly sought after expert witness, and reputedly a killer gourmet chef.
She was blonde, tall, and divorced from a professor of psychology who now taught at Berkeley. For the last fifteen years she’d been teaching at UCLA, on her way to becoming one of the country’s leading experts on the memory and the tricks it can pull.
But at the moment she was holding my hand warmly in my office. “I heard all about your fiancée,” she said. “I’m so very sorry.”
She wore a nightshade blue suit, the coat unbuttoned in deference to a white, lacy blouse. Around her neck was a large silk scarf that complemented the color scheme. Her perfume was just the right balance of subtlety and come-hither.
“Are you sure you’d like to do this now?” she asked.
“Professional duties don’t go away just because of personal trouble.”
“Well said. My father would have liked you. He was the publisher of a small-town newspaper, but he took it every bit as seriously as if it were the New York Times.”
“Old-fashioned work ethic.”
She nodded. “When my mom was in a bad way and I was over in Japan speaking, he still had to get out the paper. He was proud he never missed a deadline. That’s why I say he would have liked you, Ty. You even look a little like him.”
“Yeah?”
“He was about six-three, sandy blond hair, blue eyes. A real athlete in his day. Football.”
“I’m more of a hoopster.”
“I bet you look good in a uniform.”
Whoa. I quickly opened a drawer, pulled out the case file, and plopped it on my desk. “The Blumberg depo went pretty well, I think. I want to go over some of her answers and get your feedback. We’ve got to be prepared to cross-examine if it ever comes to that.”
“Certainly.” She gracefully slipped into a client chair. “What did you think of her?”
“Overall, she makes a good impression. Things like demeanor, directness, vulnerability.”
“All of which have alternative explanations.”
“Why don’t you expand on that a little.”
She assumed a pose in the chair that exuded power, the kind that comes from knowing more than anybody else about what you’re going to say. “Psychology, properly practiced, is the art of digging beneath surfaces. What you saw were the surfaces of Claudia Blumberg. That’s the part Kendra Mackee presents in her seminars. Only Mackee gives it her spin. What’s got them so mad is that I found out the truth.”
“You think it’s a, what did you call it, neuro-something or other?”
“Neuro rationalization. She has embedded a hatred of her father into her nervous system, so to speak. It’s much the same phenomenon as the false memories that were implanted in her by Dr. Mackee.”
“Pretend I’m a juror. Can you give this to me in terms that are understandable to a layperson?”
“Of course. The whole debate comes down to whether memories are fixed, like concrete, or malleable like warm clay. Is that easy enough?”
“Fine.”
“But it’s not just a scientific debate. We’ve raised up a generation of victims. One might even call it a victim industry, with people like Mackee making big bucks. The victims themselves see the financial rewards court judgments can bring. And they get to be on the Today show or Good Morning, America. Do you know I’ve never been asked to be on either?”
“I’m not surprised.”
“There is an incentive now to make things up, you see?”
“You don’t believe repressed memory ever happens?”
“It’s so rare as to be statistically insignificant.”
“But others disagree.”
“Others are wrong.”
At that moment Dr. Lea Edwards looked like someone who could chew through steel to bite her critics. We’d have to soften that up a little before trial. If it ever came to that.
“So Claudia Blumberg was acting?”
“Not necessarily. S
he probably really believes what she’s saying. But that’s because those memories have been implanted in her.”
“How?”
She got up and walked around the chair, her scarf trailing behind her like a comet’s tail. “Years ago a very bright advertising man figured out that in order to sell deodorant, you first had to convince as many people as possible that they stank. He came up with a television campaign that showed nice-looking young men in social settings making life stinky for the people around them. You follow?”
“I’m all over it.”
“It was a brilliant bit of group brainwashing. The product sold itself. It took off. That never would have happened without the soil being prepared.”
She was at the window now and turned around. The light caught her eyes. Violet.
“A doctor can easily do this to a child, the most vulnerable among us. He can prepare the soil in a child’s mind, then through questions actually plant the toxic weeds that will come out in falsity.”
I had the impression for a moment that she was trying to implant something in me. And succeeding.
“Ty, are you getting this?”
“Oh, yeah. Of course.”
“I lost you there for a second.”
“No, I’m fine.”
She took her chair again. “Assure me then.”
“Assure you?”
“That you’re going to be all right. That your, how did you put it?, professional duties won’t be compromised.”
“You’ve got nothing to worry about, Dr. Edwards.”
“Then I’d like one more thing,” she said.
“Yes?”
“For you to call me Lea.”
And that look came at me again. Thankfully it was broken by the tweeting of her cell phone. She picked up and from what I could gather was talking to someone about a possible newspaper interview.
When she signed off, she looked at me and said, “Is that not a good idea?”
“You can do interviews,” I said. “Just don’t mention the Blumberg litigation, okay?”
“I promise, Ty. I’m in your hands.” She smiled at me, and it was one dazzling look.
14
LESS DAZZLING was the day in L.A. A thick haze had settled over the city just in time for the lunch rush. Made Hollywood look even dirtier than it was as I drove to the Channel 5 studios on Sunset. Their offices were located in the former Warner Bros. building. They filmed The Jazz Singer there in 1927. It still had a white, Greek revival façade and a huge broadcasting tower on the corner with the call letters. You could see the Hollywood sign up in the hills.
“You can’t go in,” the gate guard said. He was SUV wide, dressed in a black security uniform. His black baseball hat had KTLA 5 in yellow across it.
“I just want to talk to Ms. Westerbrook,” I said.
“What, you think you can just drive in and talk to her?”
“Sure I can. I step on this gas pedal and use this wheel to steer. See?”
“Sir, nobody can just—”
“Would you please tell her I’m here?”
I needed to talk to Westerbrook. She was the first reporter on the scene where Jacqueline died. I guess it wasn’t much of a story to her because she never bothered to try to get in touch with me. No one did.
It was all an accident, you see. Held up traffic on the Harbor Freeway for a while, and the fatalities made it somewhat significant. But then it was on to the next story.
“You need to turn around,” the guard told me, “and call up and talk to the desk, and they’ll see what they can do.”
“But I’m here now. If you were to make the call and use my name, they might make you sergeant.”
The humor was lost on him, as well it should have been. My delivery that day was not Letterman quality.
“Can’t let you in,” the humorless guard said. “I’ll write down the number for you to call.”
He wrote it on a big yellow sticky note and handed it to me. “Now back out,” he said with gusto. He must have practiced that phrase at security guard school.
I drove down Van Ness, the walled-off studio to my right, and pulled over in the No Stopping Any Time zone. I’d left my cell phone in the car. Fortunately, it still had some juice.
I punched the number the guard had given me. A recording walked me through to the directory. I entered the first three letters of Westerbrook’s last name and got her voicemail.
I said, “If you want a lead on another murder in connection with the Ernesto Bonilla freeway death, call me.” And I left my cell number.
Then I drove to a Noodle Express on Hollywood Boulevard near Gower and got some noodles and orange chicken. The place smelled like hot oil. There was no place to sit inside so I sat on a hard, curved bench at an outside table that had some graffiti on it. The orange chicken tasted like glorified McNuggets.
My phone chimed Flight of the Valkeries, and I saw the call was from Al. I toyed with not answering, but finally did.
“What’re you doing, dude?” Al said, concern in his voice.
“Killing baby seals.”
“Great! You coming back?”
“Of course. Why?”
A short pause. “The old man was asking about the Blumberg summary.”
I’d forgotten all about it. I was supposed to prepare a pretrial summary of the key issues in the Claudia Blumberg litigation for the senior partner who’d try the case, Pierce McDonough. It was on my to-do list and everything.
“What’d he say?” I asked.
“He wanted to know where you were.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I covered for you, man. I told him I thought you were bustin’ your hump at home.”
“Thanks.”
“Anything else I can do for you? You need some help on the summary?”
“No, I’ll get to it. Thanks for the heads-up.”
I finished the last of the noodles, cold now and sticking in my mouth, then walked out to the street. The Hollywood Walk of Fame stretched out here, and I found I was standing on the five-pointed star commemorating the career of Veronica Lake. All I knew about her was that she had that famous peek-a-boo hairstyle that drove men wild in the forties.
The Valkeries struck again.
A woman’s voice. “This the guy with the murder story?”
“Channing Westerbrook?”
“So what about a murder?”
“Can we talk?”
“What have you got?”
“Let’s meet and talk about it.”
“I don’t do that,” she said. “If you have something that can be substantiated, that I can check out, then maybe we can set something up, but I’m—”
“Look, this is real. I promise you. You remember the name of the girl who died?”
“Dwyer,” she said. “I have the summary in front of me.”
“Jacqueline Dwyer.”
“That’s right. Did you know her?”
“Oh yes,” I said.
15
THE GUY WITH the muscles did not smile at me. He wore a Gold’s Gym sweatshirt with the arms cut off so his own could be seen in all their ripped glory.
He was Westerbrook’s cameraman. She had told me to meet her at the corner of Normandie and Santa Monica where she was doing a remote about a bomb scare.
“I’ve got five minutes,” Channing Westerbrook said. She had short chestnut hair and looked a little younger than she did on TV. I figured her for around thirty. She was made up for the camera. She wore a designer jacket, light pink with a pearl brooch of some kind. Below the waist it was blue jeans and sandals. Then I thought about the times I’d seen her on the tube. They always shot from the waist up.
Muscles was setting up his camera on an industrial tripod, casting glances our way as he did. Behind us was the strip mall where the bomb had been reported. Half a dozen black-and-whites were in the parking lot. Cops were milling around.
“Thanks for seeing me,” I said.
“S
o you were her fiancé?”
“Yes.”
“Can you prove it?” Her expression was no-nonsense. She had high energy, and it seemed that she couldn’t speak fast enough.
I reached for my wallet, which had Jacqueline’s picture in it. Then I realized I didn’t have my wallet. Ratso had taken it. I only had my temporary license and some cards in a billfold.
“Why would I make this up?”
“We get calls like this all the time. Gummies. We call them gummies. People who want to stick themselves on a story. Wackos who say they were the ones who saw the real killer of Bonnie Lee Bakley or Nicole Brown Simpson. Or did it themselves.”
“Do I look wacko to you?”
“Boy-next-door looks, Ted Bundy had ’em.”
“That’s right. I’m a serial killer. What a scoop for you, huh?”
She took out a package of Marlboro Lights from her jacket pocket and lit one. She shot the smoke out of one side of her mouth. “Let’s say for the moment you are who you say you are. What’s this about a murder?”
“When did you get to the scene?”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“I want to know what you heard or saw. Did you speak to anybody?”
Channing Westerbrook took another deep drag on her cigarette. “I’m not here to be questioned by you.”
“Did you question anybody at the scene? Did you follow up on Bonilla?”
“Hey.” She put her hands in the air. “You said you had something for me. Tell me what it is now or this conversation is over.”
“Somebody may have killed Jacqueline,” I said.
Channing Westerbrook squinted within a plume of smoke. “Bonilla’s body fell on her car,” she said. “Freak accident.”
“What if the body didn’t kill her?”
Muscles stood up straight. My voice had grown a little louder than normal. Channing Westerbrook did not flinch. “I did some quick background on Bonilla. Nothing remarkable. Ex-gang member, I guess, but he was working now. Your fiancée —if you’re telling me the truth —was a schoolteacher.”
“Elementary. Fifth grade. And I am telling you the truth.”
Try Dying Page 4