“Claudette?” Geld called from the conference room. “Hurry up, please, it’s time.”
She turned to find Geld chomping on an unlit cigar. John Wayne ready to storm the beaches in a World War II movie. It was all a dream. Just a bad dream. She took her seat at the conference table, aware, but not panicking at the sensation that a strange liquid streamed into her lungs. It was good, actually. This was what they said about drowning, wasn’t it? After those first couple of breaths you enjoy the narcosis of the deep?
After Geld had dispensed with the perfunctory chores, including a brief mention of the unfolding tragedy Croon and Blitzer had gone off to cover, he smiled and turned the meeting over to Harpster, who was hunched over his end of the table.
“My wife is suffering side effects from taking sedatives to control her rage at the vandalism being done to her garden,” he began in a tone that reminded Claudette X of Boris Karloff on a bad day. “I myself have slept outside nearly every night for two weeks. My neighbors have formed a garden watch society. It’s all they talk about. I want to know why we haven’t published a story.”
At the other end of the table, Pace arched her eyebrows and sighed audibly. “The gardening problems of a bourgeois neighborhood hardly make for real news, Neil. I mean, my god, it’s not like people’s pets are disappearing.”
Harpster glared at her. “The story’s been written, hasn’t it?”
“Been in the can for a week,” Geld announced.
“Then why hasn’t it run?” Harpster demanded.
“My call,” Pace said. “There were more pressing stories.”
“Your call! Who are you to make that kind of decision?”
“The Assistant Managing Editor for News and Information!”
“I’m the Assistant Managing Editor for Form and Content!”
Pace leaned forward over the table. “What exactly does that mean, other than the fact that you get paid more because you’re a man?”
The Stepford Editors shrank, their irises thickening to the consistency of soda bottle bottoms. Claudette X pushed back to avoid being caught in the cross fire. Geld pressed forward, his attention darting from one end of the table to the other like a rabid fan at a hard court tennis match.
“Paid more?” Harpster stood now. “Damn right I’m paid more. I deserve more, not because I’m a man, but because I’m a pro. I’ve got credentials! You! You’re a goddamned fashion bimbo who rode her way into her job on the back of a hairy-legged he/she who can’t write! And when that wasn’t enough, somehow you convinced my secretary to sue me for sex harassment!”
Like a platoon on a parade ground, the Stepford Editors snapped about-face and gave him the collective flinty eye. Sex harassment? This guy’s career just went poof! They shifted their attention to Pace. She still mattered.
“A bimbo!” Pace whined. “Neil called me a bimbo! You’re all witnesses.”
Geld shook his head in disbelief.
Pace got her second wind, hissing, “You demeaned that girl, you and your filthy lunchtime rendezvous. I was the one who freed her from your lecherous grasp. You’re finished, Harpster! I will be taking Ed Tower’s job!”
Ed Tower’s job? Several of the Stepford Editors wondered if they should take to their knees before this shooting star editress whose career had unfathomable velocity.
Harpster’s expression turned cockeyed. Claudette X had witnessed that sort of facial cast only once before, the day Geld learned that Pace had been given the job he’d long coveted. For a split second she wondered if Harpster would break into a crazed dance for lust lost and potential thwarted.
Harpster choked on his spittle. “I’m not the only one who’s going down. I’ve got your nutcase columnist making seven obscene phone calls to me on tape. I’m suing you and her for causing me and my wife severe mental anguish.”
Harpster stood and pointed at Geld. “Look under her fingernails! I can see dirt from here. My gut tells me Bobbie Anne shit-canned the cactus-napping story because either she or her deviate friend is the plant assassin! She’s been trying to drive me nuts so she can take Ed’s place. I’ll prove it. Connor will believe me!”
The cigar flopped from Geld’s mouth. This was better than he’d ever imagined. Yet even the dancing city editor could not have predicted what happened next. The veins at Pace’s temples stood out like worms after a heavy rain. White flecks of phlegm appeared at the corners of her mouth. She leapt onto the table, a clog held high.
“You turned my best friend into a hormonal mess!” she screamed. “Now you shall feel my wrath!”
Pace bared her canines, howled, and tore past the giant outstretched hand of Claudette X, which had reflexively reached for the editor’s ankle. A Dutch shoe rotated downward with furious intent. Harpster flipped back out of his chair. They fell onto a pile of yesterday’s editions. Harpster cowered from the blows. Pace swung and barked and swung again.
Everyone in the room played the part of perfect objective observer. Except for Claudette X, who’d seen enough street brawls to understand that a clog was as deadly as a blackjack. She dove across the table. She hauled a sweating, cursing Pace off Harpster and threw her into the corner and ordered her to “SIT!”
Confronted with a true Alpha bitch, Pace’s fury evaporated. She slid meekly to the floor and fought the urge to roll over on her back and expose her belly.
Claudette X bent over Harpster. Blood trickled from a gash on his forehead. The smell of urine filled the air. He’d pissed his tropical wool pants. She gripped him by the collar, jerked him to his feet, and sent him to the men’s room. Harpster waddled out in silence.
Claudette X waited until he was gone, looked at Pace, and pointed to the door. “Now you go get yourself cleaned up, too.” Cowering, Pace slunk through the door.
Claudette smiled. This was more like it: To keep the nightmares at bay you kept the fury high.
Geld! She clenched her fists, turned, and immediately felt the liquid surge into her lungs all over again. The entire cadre of Stepford Editors stood at attention, their eyes as translucent as fine Waterford, gazing in adoration at the city editor. Geld returned to them a snappy salute.
Mrs. Van Gogh …
“WHAT’S GOING ON, ABBY?” Croon asked once they were out on the freeway.
“What’s always going on with us, Croon?” Blitzer said. “The wretchedness of remorse. A total reversal of fortune. Or calamity. Or exceptional suffering. Anything that appeals strongly to common human sympathy and pity.”
“No, Abby, I mean with you.”
“Take your pick.”
“You going to let me in on what’s been eating at you the past few weeks or not?”
“This is our exit,” Blitzer said.
Croon cut across three lanes and roared up the ramp right into the 3200 block of Palm View Avenue. Two blocks east they saw the black SWAT van and a police barricade.
The second Croon had the car parked, Blitzer was out, moving in the direction of the barrier. Croon jogged after her. He grabbed her by the shoulder. “Before we go up there, you tell me what …”
The reporter spun and twisted out from under the photographer’s grasp. “Stay out of my business and let me do my job! Okay?”
Croon bit down hard on his back molars, a trick he’d learned at SEAL school to control his anger when he was being chewed out by a superior officer. He looked through her as if she wasn’t there. “Sure, Abby, I’ll do that.”
Blitzer hesitated, unsure of Croon’s sudden detached tone. “Good, then. Everything will be fine, then.”
“Abby, let’s just get this tragedy and get it over with. Maybe for good.”
“What’s that mean?”
“I think it’s time for us to search for catastrophe on our own.”
Croon brushed by her. Blitzer watched him jog up to one of the crowd control cops and show him his press badge. The officer nodded. Croon disappeared into the melee beyond the barrier.
Blitzer was seized by an excite
d phobic reaction, half-intellectual, half-sensory, that she had been here before. That comforted her and terrified her at the same time. Yet she noticed that she was walking now as if she had no choice in the matter, one foot after the other, faster with each step toward the cop who controlled the street.
He glanced at her press pass. “Go on in, but stay in back of the second line up there. This one’s a barbarian.”
In one motion she had her notebook and pen out and ducked under the line searching for the root of the crisis at hand. She saw Lieutenant Conrad, the SWAT team leader, standing at the rear of the black SWAT truck and homed in for the details.
“Hello, Conrad,” she said.
“Hey, Blitzer, long time no see.”
“No animals held hostage this time?”
“Just a ten-year-old little boy. So you can consider this operation preapproved by the SPCA as well as the Humane Society, thank you.”
“What do we got?”
“Just a second.” He held a finger to the headset he wore and spoke into a microphone. He turned to a black male in his late thirties dressed in a trench coat who held a portable phone. Conrad whispered. “We have a free field of fire from the roof of 3405.”
“Not yet,” the hostage negotiator mouthed. He turned away and resumed his murmurs of assurance, conciliation, and goodwill.
“Conrad?” Blitzer said.
The SWAT lieutenant pushed the microphone away from his mouth. “Gail Howe, forty-one. Makes her living as a free-lance graphic designer. Neighbors say she’s been supporting a Stephen Bernstein, struggling artist … painter I think … and his son the past eight years. Kid’s name is Isaac, aged ten. Bernstein supposedly hit it big, a New York show, loads of recognition, promise of money. And, as the story goes, Bernstein told Howe he and Isaac were moving out about a week ago.”
“So he basically sucked her dry until his boat came in.”
“It’s a shitty world, but she didn’t have to take it out on the kid.”
Blitzer didn’t want to hear what was already coming out of Conrad’s mouth.
“As far as we can tell Howe’s been taking antidepressants ever since Bernstein dropped the bomb. Busbar, some drug the FDA just pulled off the market. Turns out they have a nasty hallucinatory side effect if you double them up.”
“That’s enough,” Blitzer said. “I can’t take this anymore.”
She began to walk away.
“She cut the kid’s ear off,” Conrad called after her. “She’s threatening to take the other if Bernstein doesn’t come back to her.”
Blitzer stopped. She saw the face of a little boy peering out from the pages of a newspaper, a perfect little ten-year-old boy with a gap in his front teeth and sandy blond hair and a shy smile. She felt the unmistakable, seductive, evil craving for Jack Daniel’s slip over her like a shroud.
The hostage negotiator yelled to Conrad. The SWAT lieutenant bellowed into the microphone. The flat crack of the .270 sniper’s rifle came to her as if over a telephone line marred by static. She moved toward the noise, the way one will move toward something familiar in a foreign place. She noticed an opening in the phalanx of police officers and wandered through. Two paramedics rushed toward her, carrying a gurney. A little boy cried and bled on the gurney. Blitzer followed him toward the flashing red ambulance, turning finally at an insistent bumping from behind and calls for her to get out of the way.
A woman on this gurney. Strapped down. Red sunset on her right shoulder. Her tongue not acting normal, hanging out the side. And Blitzer sobbing now, pleaded with the woman “How could you do it to him? How could you do that to a little boy?”
And the woman, dazed by the gunshot and the rush of events, lolled her rag doll head to see the little reporter. “Didn’t you know?” she slurred. “I’m Mrs. Van Gogh!”
Blitzer barely remembered striking the woman, let alone Croon grabbing her from behind while she flailed and cried and demanded the right to put the bitch out of her misery.
It was almost an hour until the kaleidoscope perceptions gathered into a whole and she knew that she was in Croon’s arms and they were on somebody’s front lawn down the street from where Gail Howe had mutilated her boyfriend’s son.
Blitzer raised her head to Croon.
“I was drunk,” she whispered. “I was at a bar for happy hour one night after work and I refused to let my fiancé drive me home. When he wasn’t looking I skipped out the back and got behind the wheel. I don’t remember hitting the boy, not really, just a thump on the way home. I thought he was a pothole.”
“Abby, I didn’t …”
She pressed her fingers to his lips. “You have a right to know. His name was Dennis Carter. He was ten and wanted to be a movie director. He had a video camera that he took with him everywhere he went. They found it near him.
“I saw the story in the paper the next day. A tragic hit-and-run. They said he was wearing a red shirt when he was hit. I went to the garage to head for work. Hung over as usual. I saw the shred of a red shirt stuck in the corner of my car near the headlight.”
“You never told anyone?”
“I was too afraid,” Blitzer said. “Too afraid that they wouldn’t punish me enough for taking that little boy’s life. So I got sober and decided to punish myself every day by getting a job where I had to confront tragedy on a never-ending basis. Only harsh reality became a drug like any other. I got hooked on it, Croon, and it masked what I had done and wouldn’t let me go until it started to eat me.”
Blitzer shivered in the heat. Croon tightened his grip on her.
“I’m tired of tragedy. I was tired of it before News died, but I just couldn’t stop. I feel like Dennis Carter’s this monkey on my back. I need to tell his mother what I did to him before I get hooked on something more narcotic than tragedy that’ll sedate me to where it doesn’t matter if she knows or not.”
Croon stroked her hair. “I’ll go with you, Abby.”
“Why would you do that, Croon?”
“Because I don’t think you’ll ever think it didn’t matter. It’s always going to be there to hurt you. That’s what personal tragedy is, a painful mystery that’s never solved.”
“How do I live then?” Blitzer whispered.
“You get hooked on something that helps even the weakest people in the most tragic of circumstances to survive.”
“What’s that?”
“Love.”
When she looked up at him he was crying. She cried, too, and smiled at the same time.
“I think I could do that, Augustus Croon. One day at a time.”
He Died Smiling …
AT THE SAME TIME, McCarthy was sweltering in the heat outside the Los Angeles County Jail, waiting to see Shirley Barfield, the hooker who’d gone with Gentry to one of Tiger’s parties.
He’d been here nearly two hours, waiting, while other members of the motley visitor’s group had already been allowed the enter. The deputy in charge of visits had made it clear she considered reporters scum lower than child pornographers, crack whores, and criminal defense attorneys. He was about to go plead with her again, when she called out his name.
A second deputy, square-jawed and muscular, accompanied him to a room divided by partitions of bulletproof glass. A brooding guard sat inside an elevated glass box at the center of the room. “You got booth seven,” the deputy growled.
He walked down the row looking for the hooker who had been to one of Tiger’s parties. Shirley Barfield, a.k.a. Anne Carris, was already seated on her side of booth seven, already making an evaluation, a street survivor appraising him as predator or prey.
Peroxide blond, pouting lips, a pert nose, and brown searching eyes. Mid-twenties. Even in the baggy jail clothes, McCarthy could tell her body was long. Her breasts were high and large. She shifted so her bearing altered from streetwise to erotic promise. She’d probably used it a thousand times on a thousand strange men.
“What do you want with me, lover?” she asked. Her vo
ice rolled, a husky blend of velvet and too many cigarettes.
“My name’s McCarthy. I’m a reporter with The Post.”
In an instant the pose of hooker to street John vanished. Panic seized her and diminished her to the point of child before the fall.
Before she could get up, McCarthy blurted, “Those two cops didn’t kill Gentry. It had to do with Tiger’s Escort, didn’t it? Please, I believe my best friend was killed because of this.”
Barfield slumped in the chair. “I’m scared,” she whispered.
“That’s why you have to tell me,” McCarthy said. “You’ll be safer if someone else knows. It’s protection.”
He forced himself to soften his face and open his eyes wide and kind, projecting the persona of the caring social worker. Barfield wavered, the child and the whore doing battle. The whore won, but barely. “What’s in it for me?” she asked.
“I can talk to the cops. I know the homicide detective in charge of this case.”
The second laugh was heartless. “Fisk? You’re in the dark, aren’t you?”
McCarthy stammered, “What are you talking about?”
“He knew Carol Alice, used her just like he used me. Like he used a lot of the girls on the Boulevard.”
McCarthy’s thoughts lurched back to Fisk in his office, Fisk angry when he said he didn’t believe Blanca and Patrick were the killers. And Gentry! This goes up much higher than street cops.
“Tell me about Fisk.”
“I asked you before, what’s in it for me?”
“I’ve got $125 in my wallet. I’ll bring you more.”
Barfield leaned back in her chair. “It’s a start.”
McCarthy drew out his notebook. “Let’s go then. How did Fish use Gentry?”
“She was his informant, just like me,” Barfield said. “That was back about a year, year and a half ago, when Fisk was working Internal Affairs before homicide.”
McCarthy interrupted her. “Fisk has never worked LA. He couldn’t. He had his own problems ten years ago.”
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