City of Angels (The Trials of Kit Shannon #1)

by James Scott Bell

  Kit steadied her emotions by taking in a deep breath. "Mr. Sloate, please let me by."

  "Don't go just yet," Sloate said.

  "Please."

  His eyes narrowed, becoming slits of gray. Suddenly his hands were on her shoulders, and he pulled her to himself. He found her mouth with his.

  Kit fought against his embrace, but he was stronger than he appeared. She managed to turn her head.

  "Stop!" Kit pushed away, but her back hit the wall with a hard thump. Sloate ran his hand upward from her waist. He squeezed her closer, his strong grasp taking the breath out of her. She tried once more to push him away, but he was imbued with a lustful intensity. He pressed his lips on her neck. She turned her head left, then right, her hat flying off in the process.

  "No!" Kit managed to say, but it was muffled in another kiss as Sloate moved on relentlessly.

  Kit felt along the wall with her hand, seeking anything that might serve as an anchor to pull herself away. She felt the corner of a small table and scoured its surface. Her hand closed around a small, heavy sculpture of some kind.

  With a force that frightened her, Kit slammed the implement into the side of Sloate's face. He shrieked and crumbled to the floor.

  Fighting for breath, Kit tossed the statuette on the table, seeing in passing that it was a small rendition of Michaelangelo's David. She ran for Sloate's door.

  "If you say one word to anyone!" Sloate screamed after her. She raced down the wooden stairs that led to the front door of the building and burst out onto the street.

  Chapter Six

  HE HATED LIGHT. For as long as he could remember, light was his enemy. It shone brightly and exposed him, burned through him like a candle through a leaf.

  Oh, he could walk in the light. He could go about his business and appear as normal and, yes, even as winsome as any other man. In fact, part of him desired to inhabit that aspect permanently.

  But the greater part desired darkness.

  He had known since he was a child that he was two people, two sides. One side was dutiful, even charming. It could live among people and thrive.

  The other side, though, was the one that captured his imagination. This side told him there was no need to live a life of rules and regulations as everyone said, as everyone wanted to force on him. He had lived in that sort of world, with everyone telling him what to do, since he was a child, and they had put "the fear of God" into him.

  As a boy he would sometimes go back and forth between his two aspects as his father laid the leather on his back. What he found was that the good side took the pain too much to heart. The other side, the side that showed contempt for God or any fear of Him, felt much better. He had learned early on to inhabit that side when his father was ready to beat him. He had learned early on to despise God.

  He had also learned to fool everyone at his pleasure. He could be charming for as long as he wished, days even, and no one would be the wiser.

  A few years ago he had read Stevenson's tale, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and felt he was reading his own biography. It was true—two natures could co-exist in one body, both needing to breathe free. . . .

  Now, as he walked the teeming streets in the light, he felt freer than he had in years. He had wondered what it would be like to shed blood finally, after thinking about it for so long. It had been good. It was liberating. The ultimate adventure. He was hungry to try it again.

  Feeling that hunger rise within him, something he could not control, he also felt a slight pang of regret for what he knew he would soon do.

  Why should he be this way? he asked himself. But the voice that asked was small in comparison to the rising vociferation of need.

  It was now a matter of choice. Whom would he consume?

  There was the unmistakable pull toward the dirty women who sold themselves to men. In that way he could purge not only their sin but his own, the sin his father so gladly reminded him of at every opportunity.

  But there was another thought, one he had not had previously. There was also sin in the opposite world, the world of the beauties and socialites who flitted with such smugness across ballrooms and mansions throughout the city. The same ones he would charm and cajole when he was feeling, well, more like Jekyll.

  One face came to his mind again, as it had done several times previously. The pretty, fresh face of the young girl from the East, the spirited one. Red hair, green eyes, lovely to look at.

  Perhaps she should be the one. For he sensed she was not one of the smug ones now, but untainted. If he consumed her he could keep her from that sin, from being stained.

  He had the day to think about it. His hunger always sought its final satisfaction at night.

  Night . . .

  ———

  Almost swooning, Kit realized she had walked a city block with virtually no recall of her steps. Her head was ablaze with visions of Sloate's attack. Added to that was a volatile combination of indignity and outrage. That he had lured her to his office with a promise of a possible professional position and then turned so viciously on her, made her feel both soiled and livid. She didn't know whether to crawl under a rock or kick down a door.

  The afternoon sun beat down on the city and Kit's bare head. Added to her indignation was the realization that her hat was still in the office of Heath Sloate. What would he do with it? Tear it to shreds or keep it as an object of scorn?

  Her legs kept moving. Kit heard a loud yell from a man seated on a buckboard being driven by a very large horse. "Watch out there!" he bellowed, and Kit found herself in the middle of the street as the man yanked at his horse just before it would have knocked her to the ground. It came so close she could feel the snorting breath of the animal, which seemed as angry as its master.

  "Get outter the street!" the man bellowed, and Kit, her mind reeling, stumbled off the asphaltum strip and onto the cemented sidewalk.

  Here she paused, finally, to catch her breath. She had no idea where she was. The street looked like others she had seen, and the passing parade of pedestrians paid her no mind. Though she had been told how the streets of downtown had been laid out in a grid, she had to admit that for the moment at least, she was lost.

  Lost . . .

  The feeling in the pit of her stomach was familiar. It was the same, she realized, as the day she'd been told her father—her anchor in the swirling world—had been killed in a local saloon.

  As was told to her later, Harry Shannon had been riding through Lowell on his horse, having preached a Wednesday night sermon in the little village of Fawrhat. The locals knew her father by name and vocation, and more than a few of them didn't like him one bit. He preached temperance, and that was not what the liquor trade and barflies in Lowell wanted to hear.

  This night as he rode by a saloon called the Blarney Cove—Irish in name and habitués—two of the town's loudmouths had shouted to him, calling him a coward for not coming in where all the "sinners" were.

  Well, Harry Shannon was never one to run from a fight—with his fists when he was a pagan and with his words after he was saved. The two louts must have shuddered in wonder, Kit always believed, when the preacher took them up on their challenge.

  Harry Shannon was a big man, too, and how Kit wished she could have witnessed that scene: Her daddy marching right into the pit with his Bible, slamming it on the bar, and announcing that he was going to preach a sermon right then and there.

  She was told later that his text was from Proverbs 23, and that he kept returning to the verse, "Be not among winebibbers; among riotous eaters of flesh" when a drunken man shouted at her father to "shut his mug." Her father refused and kept right on with, "The drunkard and the glutton shall come to poverty, and drowsiness shall clothe a man with rags." At that point the drunk pulled a pistol from his coat and waved it around in the air.

  Then things happened quickly. Another patron, this one more favorably disposed to her father's message, began urging the troublemaker to let things be. When
the man refused and became even more insistent that Harry leave the bar, the other man tried to rush him.

  The bystanders quickly ran away or ducked under tables, fearing gunfire.

  Her father ran right toward the trouble. The two men were wrestling each other, the one man holding the wrist of the drunk with the gun, keeping the revolver at bay.

  "Stop this, men!" her father was said to have shouted. Those were his last words. Just as he reached the combatants, the drunk freed himself, took one step backward, and the gun—depending on the account—was either fired deliberately or just went off.

  A single bullet entered her father's heart. He fell to the floor and died almost immediately.

  When Kit heard that her father was dead, all belief in the goodness of life rushed out of her eleven-year-old body. How could it be? She would never sit on his lap again, never smell his wonderful Papa smell and listen to his lilting Irish voice tell stories from the Bible. She still had her mother, of course, but Papa had been her lighthouse, her beacon in the darkness. She felt secure and right with him in her life. And she felt she could accomplish anything when he told her that she could, indeed, make her life account for something.

  Without him she was lost. . . .

  As she was now, standing in the heart of Los Angeles, suddenly as desolate a place as the farthest unexplored island.

  Kit began to walk again, needing to move, not knowing or caring where she was going. Just to get as far away from Heath Sloate as she could.

  At the crest of a hill, she came around a corner and stopped at the sight of a majestic rose-stone building. A proud clock tower dominated the front, winged by a tiled roof of copper, gold, and red. Kit was drawn to it as if hypnotized, as if a voice inside the place called out to her like a ghost in some Gothic novel.

  She walked toward the building. When she reached the stone steps leading up to the large doors, she saw the brass-plated sign and knew why she had felt compelled. County Courthouse, it read.

  That's when the tears came. The sting of humiliation was now coupled with a stark truth: She would never get inside that building. Not as a member of the bar, anyway. Maybe this was God's sign, His will that she forever be shut out of the inner court, a mere spectator.

  Aware that people were near, she hid her face in her gloved hand and turned quickly to walk away.

  She bumped hard into a man and fell backward. The jolt made her sorry she'd not allowed Mrs. Norris to sew padding into her petticoat.

  "I am sorry!" the man said quickly. His voice was resonant, pleasant. Kit saw only his white pants and, of all things, spats. She felt his hands take hers and begin pulling her to her feet.

  He would see her red eyes, no doubt. She attempted to look away even as she uttered her own apology.

  "Now, then, what's the trouble?" the man said.

  There was no hiding her distress. Kit turned to look at him. He was young, perhaps in his early thirties, and he had thick black eyebrows that almost met and arched upward at the temple. He was fine featured, his nose and mouth aqualine, with high cheekbones plainly marked. His eyes were a piercing blue. They reminded her of Ted Fox's eyes. But in these eyes was a coiled intensity as well as a sharpness of vision, as if he could see things others could not. A man, Kit thought, that could not be fooled.

  "I'm sorry, sir. Please excuse my outburst," Kit said.

  "Outbursts usually have a purpose," the man said, his tone friendly. In a resplendent white suit and straw hat, he looked like what her father might have called a "dandy." Yet there was nothing dandy about him. He seemed somehow tough even though he was, at the moment, tender. "Can you tell me why it should happen outside the courthouse?"

  Should she tell him, a perfect stranger? Unburden herself to him, even though she didn't know him from Adam? Well, she had nothing to gain or lose at this point, so she heard herself say to him, "Sir, do you think it unseemly for a woman to practice law?"

  The man smiled then, showing perfect white teeth. He seemed surprised and delighted. "That all depends," he said, "on the woman."

  Who was he? she wondered.

  "Would that woman be you?" he asked.

  "I have a law certificate from the Women's Legal Education Society in New York," Kit said. "I thought in coming to Los Angeles I might find opportunity."

  "I see. By your reaction, you fear there may be none?"

  She didn't answer, knowing the look on her face was answer enough. The man took a gold watch from his vest pocket, looked at the time, then said, "Have you ever witnessed a trial?"

  No, never. She had no thought of becoming a courtroom lawyer. Of all the women she had heard of who were admitted to the bar, none had been a trial lawyer. It just wasn't done.

  "I have not, sir," she said.

  "Tell you what. Come on inside. Spend a couple of hours watching."

  Before she knew what was happening, he had taken her arm and was leading her up the steps toward the courthouse doors.

  "I'm sorry, sir, but I don't know you," she said, feeling she should at least hold up a certain decorum for Aunt Freddy's sake.

  "You do now," the man said. "My name's Earl Rogers. I practice law."

  ———

  Heath Sloate pressed the wet handkerchief to his throbbing temple. He stopped the flow of blood, which hadn't been as much as he had feared. When that demon girl hit him he thought it was a deeper wound and feared blood would get all over his clothes and worse, his Oriental carpet. Luck had been with him there. The only sign of bleeding now was the red splotch on his linen handkerchief.

  His head would hurt for days. How he hated physical pain! He loathed even a hint of imperfection in his physical or sartorial makeup. But much worse than all that—worse even than the pain and the bruise that would come—was the indignity. To have that strumpet turn down his proposition! A girl with no prospects at all, and he in a position to help her. He, Sloate, who could do more for her with a single wave of his arm than she could in one hundred years by herself. To have this little witch resist and then attack him! It was almost more than he could bear.

  His first thoughts were violent, but he quickly reminded himself he would never have to stoop to that. After all, he had spent a lifetime learning to get his way without having to devolve to mere corporal measures.

  Coming of age in a boarding school where he was the smallest in his class forced Sloate to learn all the tricks of mental survival. He remembered how, when he was twelve, one of the "uppers," a sixteen-year-old, big and proud of his physical prowess, had pulled down Heath's pants in the open quad one day for no other reason than sport. In the midst of derisive laughter, unable to stop his humiliation, Heath Sloate felt his first real fire of lethal hate. But being at the top of his class academically, he knew that what he couldn't do with fists he could do with brains.

  His tormentor, Wexell, was being groomed by his father for a career in politics, and Tomlin's School was considered the very best preparatory education for this. If one came out with a clean record there, one could pick and choose among a handful of eminent colleges—Harvard, Yale, Dartmouth, Princeton—and virtually ensure a jeweled career. The opposite was true as well. A black mark at this level would seriously hinder a climb up the rungs.

  The plan Heath Sloate formed came to him all at once and involved the elegant silver snuffbox that sat regally on the desk of Headmaster James Mills, who also taught Latin. Mills had received it, he was fond of saying, from General Andy Jackson himself after the Battle of New Orleans where Mills, as a thirty-two-year-old officer, had distinguished himself.

  The plan was simple because it was so inconceivable. No one would have dared to even touch the snuffbox. Old Mills, his bushy white mustache flecked with fine tobacco detritus, would have rapped with his knotty cane any hand that came close. However, it was not difficult in the least for Heath to purloin the box one day during the games.

  Wexell and his roommate were, of course, involved in the races and throwing events, and the entire sc
hool was watching. So it was no great feat for Heath to enter Wexell's room and slip the silver box under Wexell's pine wardrobe, the one with the fancy New York clothes his daddy had purchased for him.

  The next day the school was in an uproar, starting with Old Mills waving his cane in the air like a saber, threatening to whack the entire student body unless the thief stepped forward. Heath felt exhilarated at the power he wielded. This pandemonium was all because of him! And no one knew, or would ever know, the source.

  After letting the tempest play for a day, Heath enacted the final part of his scheme—he lied. He was pleased with his ability to lie because he saw it as the avenue of his rage. He knew from that moment onward he would be able to say whatever he wanted to say and people would believe him, whether it was based in truth or not.

  He appeared in Old Mills' office sheepishly to report that he had heard a snippet of conversation, that it concerned the snuffbox, but that he was loathe to report it out of honor. He was even able to bring forth a tear as he asked the headmaster what he should do with his terrible secret.

  The old man reacted just as Sloate had known he would. With a grandfatherly embrace, he told Heath that he was proud of him for coming forward and for feeling in his breast the tug of an ethical conundrum. "That is what makes men of boys," he said. "Now tell me who took my box."

  Sloate asked if his identity would have to be revealed. Mills assured him it would not, for he was not accusing anyone but only reporting information. Assured of that, Heath let out that this was only a rumor based upon an overheard discourse, but that the name Wexell had come up and something about a hiding place right in his room.

  Events happened quickly after that. Old Mills, with two seniors in tow, barged into Wexell's room and, in the face of Wexell's wailing and denials, proceeded to search the place. The box was found under the wardrobe.

  Wexell was expelled, his reputation ruined. And Heath Sloate, upon his graduation from Tomlin's, was given one of the most glowing recommendations ever from the school, signed by James Mills himself.