Trial and Terror

by ADAM L PENENBERG

  Summer shot him again. Nothing.

  He pulled the gun to his mouth and puckered his lips around the barrel. Summer squeezed the trigger, felt the spring action load. But no bullet. Not even a blank.

  Marsalis spat out the gun. “Tastes like rust.”

  Summer fired at Marsalis’s profile. He slumped forward, clutched his heart, shut his eyes, but continued steering. He sprang to life. “No bullets. Satisfied?”

  “There are two shots left.” Again, Summer pulled the trigger.

  This time Marsalis flinched. He veered into the opposing lane; a truck, horn blaring, hurtled at them. When Summer braced for impact, Marsalis grabbed the barrel of the gun and torqued the steering wheel. They swerved back into their own lane.

  They wrestled for the gun, Marsalis straining to direct the barrel away from his head. They were doing a steady 120. They squirted between two trucks, passing them like they were going backward.

  Summer squeezed the trigger and fought the gun’s recoil. There was a tremendous explosion as the driver’s side window shattered, showering them with glass. Wind whistled inside the car.

  Marsalis let go of the barrel and rode the brake, slowing to 55. They passed a road sign. Next right: Fayres 10 miles, St. Freeburgh 12 miles, Redwood Falls 26 miles. They were at Haze County’s northern edge. Marsalis was breathing rapidly, sweat prickling on his forehead. After wiping her prints, Summer tossed the gun into the back.

  They were silent until the turn off, and then Marsalis said, “There’s glass in your leg, from the window.”

  Summer plucked a fragment out of her shorts.

  “You figured out it was a test,” Marsalis said.

  “It wasn’t your first.”

  “How did you know there was only one bullet?”

  “The heft of the gun.” Summer looked out onto the moving landscape, the vineyards bursting purple, ice-capped mountains, a pack of deer. Here, over the Santa Ana Range, it was cool and lush.

  Marsalis brushed errant glass off the dashboard. “Wib taught you to shoot?”

  “He gave me a gun for my Sweet Sixteen.”

  “How did you know the last chamber held the only bullet?”

  She shrugged. “I knew you wouldn’t leave anything to chance.”

  Marsalis took the turn to Fayres. “I’m curious as to what you’re feeling right now.”

  Summer hid behind a mask of impassivity.

  Marsalis continued, “But curiosity can get you into trouble, or endanger others. Take Jimi Cruz.”

  “How does Jimi Cruz pose a danger to you?”

  “To you.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I know you don’t watch much TV, but tune into Channel 54 tomorrow, a cable-access show of mine that debuts at 3:30 a.m. I have a wonderful surprise for you.” Marsalis ungripped the wheel and posed: Two thumbs up.

  “What have you done to Jimi Cruz?” she asked.

  Marsalis was back on the wheel. “Tune in tomorrow.”

  Summer tried to put the puzzle together, but there weren’t enough pieces. She knew of no strategy that would force Marsalis to give her what she wanted. He had a drug dealer way about him: He made himself indispensible; then, after hooking her, pressed his advantage. All she could do was wait him out.

  They passed a sign for a lakefront resort.

  “Enough about Jimi Cruz,” Marsalis said. “Let’s talk about Sonia.”

  Summer fidgeted with her seat belt. “Sure.”

  Marsalis parked near the lake, the town’s tourist magnet. A short distance away, there was a resort, restaurants, cafés, a bookstore, and shops bursting with kitsch. The lake shimmered emerald. Tourists meandered along the water’s edge.

  “Right off there”—Marsalis pointed out a spot on the path running along the lake—“is where the doll and the child’s corpse were found.” Marsalis reached across Summer’s body and opened her door. “Sonia’s waiting,” he crooned.

  Summer continued to sit in shocked stillness, but Marsalis insisted, flicking her shoulder with his fingers. She got out of the car, her knees crackling. She looked around, wary of her new freedom. But Marsalis took care of that when he slammed the door shut and, kicking up gravel, peeled out.

  After she watched Marsalis shrink to a crumb on the horizon, Summer took the path to the water and skirted the edge. She surveyed the terrain. The banks were slippery, few vines to hang onto. A snake sunned itself on a log. Cattails grew in the muck. The scent of skunk cabbage. Summer tried to visualize what must have happened. The girl must have slid through those cattails.

  With mincing steps, she approached the water. Below the surface was a doll, tethered off shore. Another Marsalis prop, she thought. She leaned over for a better look when her footing gave way. She slipped, flailing in the mud, and pitched headfirst into glacier-fed water. After adjusting to the icy shock, she treaded over to the doll. She untethered it and tossed it up on the bank. Relying on vines jutting out of the mud, she pulled herself up to land. Sopping wet, she stood on the shore—stared at the doll, studied the water.

  The doll was filthy and waterlogged, one of its eyes popped out. Summer remembered when and where she had last seen it: As a teenager she had rifled through one of her mother’s closets, looking for a special pair of shoes, when she came across a box holding an old doll wrapped in tissue paper. When Sonia found out, she panicked. She told Summer to never go through her belongings ever again. No other explanation. Just a somber retreat, then guilt: Sonia’s modus operandi.

  No, this doll wasn’t a Marsalis prop.

  Heart fluttering, Summer rode the vines into the water and located the string that had anchored the doll. Seaweed and vines grabbing at her legs and ankles, she played an imaginary game of tug of war, using the string to propel herself forward through the underwater thicket searching for its origin. When she got to the end she clawed through the mass of vines just under the surface, unraveling one ropey strand at a time, wishing she had a knife. Unable to see what her hands were doing, she picked and pulled vines until her fingers dug into something hard. Breathing hard and flushed with fear, she worked faster now, until she viewed a partially decomposed head.

  Oh my God.

  Panicking, Summer retreated, climbing up the bank and collapsing on a carpet of leaves, alternating between guttural sobs and dry heaves. It took her a while to regain enough composure to sit up. She looked around, listened to the birds whistling, the crickets chirping, the rustling sound made when a slight breeze tickled the trees. The way sunlight caught the lake was beautiful, she thought. Then she felt like something wasn’t quite right, an object out of place; her intuition playing tricks? No. There, propped between two partially secreted tree branches, an unnatural object. Summer peered into the lens and realized Marsalis had watched the whole thing. Before she knew what she was doing, she’d ripped Marsalis’s surveillance gear down and onto the ground, trampling it with her shoes. Then she flung it into the woods. Immediately after she was sorry; she had just giving Marsalis even more of a thrill.

  A few minutes later, while Summer wound down the hiking trail, watching the sun shimmer on the lake, she tried to piece together what had happened. Sonia, her body and mind ravaged by melanoma, must have decided to return to the scene of her crime of abandonment. Summer always wondered why Sonia had accepted so much responsibility for Wib’s lonely death. She believed she had killed them both with her inattentiveness, which would partially explain why she had doted so much on Summer, suffocating her for the better part of her childhood.

  When Summer got to the lodge, she phoned the medical examiner.

  Chantelle bitched about the extra work. “Two bodies in one day? What the hell kind of investigation are you conducting?”

  “A very stressful one,” Summer said.

  “Do you at least have any idea who the victim is?”

  Summer was shivering, her lips purple. Eventually she managed to say, “My mother.”

  Chapter 17

>   Melba Ignacio sat behind the smudged glass partition thumbing through a Bible. They all find God in the slammer, Summer thought, like a jury would forgive them so long as they’ve let the Lord into their life. Ignacio was on the road to 40, and a rough ride it had been. Acne scars ate at her cheeks. Gray roots poked through short black hair. A jaundiced dot marked her eye.

  The phone pinned between her shoulder and ear, Summer held the note Rosie had passed her up to the glass. “This yours?”

  Ignacio picked up the phone and said in a smoky voice, “You SK’s lawyer?”

  “That’s right,” Summer said.

  “I got information about Gundy,” Ignacio said. “You help me, I help you.”

  “You already have an attorney.”

  “Fuck, yeah, I know. Rosie and me, we go way the fuck back. Grew up together. Same shitty neighborhood. But she won’t help me out.”

  “If you asked her to spring you, she can’t.”

  “I’m innocent, all right? I may be a cocksucker, but I ain’t no dope shagger.”

  Summer held up the police report and tapped it with her finger. “You ran away from a cop and dropped ten vials of crack at her feet.”

  “Personal consumption, and I only had two vials,” Ignacio explained. “They trumped up them charges and shit. I was framed.”

  “Why would the cops do that?”

  “Look. Me and Gundy? We had this arrangement. He’d call, I’d come by. For two fucking years. I came by the night someone fucked him up good.”

  “What time?”

  “He told me be there by ten but I was late, like twenty minutes. Had to find a sitter for my kid, ’cause my man and me had a fight.”

  “What does Gundy’s place look like?”

  “It’s in the Prairie View district. Split-level action. Condo, sidewalk out front. The outside’s painted this ugly baby diarrhea color.”

  Summer’s mouth went dry. “Could you describe the person you saw?”

  “That’s why I got you here.”

  “Well?”

  Ignacio regarded her cuticles. “All I’m gonna say now is that it wasn’t no SK.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We’re in the same cellblock. See her every fucking day. She’s cool. Knows this kung fu shit, so the guards are afraid of her. Sometimes the motherfuckers beat the shit out of us for no reason. But they don’t wanna fuck with here. She’s chilled out the tensions between the Cholos and other Latinas, blacks, whites—like one happy fucking United Nations.”

  “You’re telling me you saw someone leave Gundy’s around the time of the murder. You get a good look?”

  “Pretty good.”

  “What was she wearing?”

  “I didn’t say ‘she’.”

  “He?”

  “Didn’t say ‘he’ neither.”

  “What are you saying?” Summer asked impatiently.

  Ignacio folded her arms. “That’ll cost you.”

  “Money? What are you going to do with that?”

  “I ain’t asking for money. I just want you to get me out of here.”

  Summer ground her molars. “Tell me about your relationship to Gundy. Were you lovers?”

  “No lovin’, just sex. He was into hardcore S&M, liked to hurt girls, drip candle wax, smack them around, tie them up. He ran a tab with Sexcorts, the place I worked. Most of the other girls wouldn’t have nothing to do with him. I mean cra-a-azy. But, I ain’t stupid. I don’t have the look men want to know better anymore. I took what I could get, and what I could get was Gundy.”

  “There’s not much I can do for you. This is a felony. The best you could do is cop a plea, maybe get it reduced from intent to sell to misdemeanor possession, although the D.A’s reluctant to do that these days. With your record, no matter what, you’re still going to do time.”

  “Bullshit. You know if you wanna get me out, you can. All you gotta do is talk to the man. Street-speak. Say for $1500, he’ll lose your file for you. Then they gotta let you go. But you got to hurry. The trial starts tomorrow.”

  “You’re asking a lot.”

  Ignacio shrugged. “Fifteen hundred bucks and a phone call’s all I’m asking. But believe me, it’s worth it.”

  Summer took a moment to think. It was risky. After Cruz, could she afford to bend the law again? Could this blow her case wide open? Or just blow it up? “I’m not promising anything,” she said, “but say there’s this miracle, and you get out. Will you testify under oath? Tell a jury you saw someone other than SK come out of his condo? Tell the court about Gundy’s sexual perversions?”

  “I’ll do anything to get out of here. I want to see my baby. Can you understand that? I know I fucked up, but I gotta be there for him. I’m all he’s got.”

  “Don’t talk to the press, no newspapers, TV, nothing.”

  “I won’t. Here’s what you do. Talk to this lawyer, Eddie Brockton. He be the man that can make files disappear.”

  Chapter 18

  Her alarm went off at 3:20, but Summer was already up, sipping peppermint tea to settle her jangly stomach.

  She tuned into cable-access Channel 67, a local station with a hodgepodge of programs covered by the First Amendment. The original intention had been to foster community programs; instead, viewers were confronted with 24 hours of political diatribes, endless loops advertising escort services and phone sex, psychic babble, anarchist manifestos, and political extremism.

  Summer endured the one-minute program break, and then the screen shifted into grainy video. She could see Jimi Cruz on the floor, his back propped against a dirty stone wall. He was tying his arm with a hose, one end stuck in his mouth. He was all attention as he held a lighter under a tablespoon. When powder bubbled into liquid, Cruz sucked it up with a syringe.

  “It’s good stuff?” Cruz asked.

  “The best.” Marsalis’s voice, off camera. “And more where that came from.”

  Cruz smiled dreamily. He found a vein, and Summer watched the needle disappear into his arm, watched the plunger push the narc into him.

  “Why did you come back to Haze County?” Marsalis asked. “Why didn’t you stay in Las Vegas?”

  Cruz’s breathing was relaxed. He talked softly. “I didn’t know anybody in Vegas, didn’t know the scene there.”

  “That is not the reason, is it?”

  “C’mon, man.”

  “You shouldn’t have come back.”

  “I just met you. How do you know this?”

  “Tell me the truth, Jimi, or I’m taking my heroin.”

  “Wait!” Cruz’s eyes were sugar-glazed. “OK, OK. There was this lawyer, really cool. Beautiful girl. I was curious. I wondered, like, what’s her deal? How could someone so pretty, so together, be so sad, you know? I just want to take care of her. Like by helping her, I’d be turning my own life around. Kick this habit, get a life. Stupid, huh?”

  “Pointless,” Marsalis said.

  Cruz wretched, grasped his sternum with his hands. “That’s a weird kick.”

  “It’s the poison,” Marsalis said. “You’ll feel differently in a moment.”

  Cruz rolled onto his side. “Where’d you pick up that little bit of slang? I thought me and my friends were the only ones calling it that.”

  The camera panned closer. Pebbles of sweat swept over Cruz’s face.

  “By coming back, you have jeopardized the very person you wanted to save,” Marsalis said. “If the D.A. finds out, they will hold her responsible. This I cannot allow.”

  Cruz was almost unconscious. “You’re not running me out of town, man.”

  “What is the last thing you wish to say, Jimi?”

  “Huh?” More a groan than a question.

  “You’re going to die now,” Marsalis said. “Tell me the very last thought you’ll ever have.”

  Cruz was able to whisper one last word before his head flopped against the floor and his eyes rolled heavenward: “Summer.”

  Chapter 19

  Al
l Summer could think about, while a maid led her along the outer edge of Brockton’s stucco house and to his swimming pool, was death: Sonia’s death, Wib’s death, Cruz’s death, Gundy’s death. She barely felt alive herself, as if each passing took a piece of her with it.

  The maid left Summer with Brockton, who was nestled under an umbrella with a 6-foot redhead. Other B-girl clients sunbathed topless.

  Brockton talked from behind sunglasses. “I was beginning to think you didn’t like me.”

  “I don’t.” Summer addressed the redhead. “Could you excuse us?”

  The woman threw Summer a catty look. Summer returned it.

  Brockton mediated. “Beat it, Ramona, por favor.”

  Ramona took her time unwinding from Brockton. Before sashaying away, she branded him with a kiss.

  Summer said, “I’m amazed how boob jobs have changed America’s landscape.”

  Brockton rubbed oil on his nipples. “Don’t tell me your tits are real.”

  Summer spun her eyes in disgust.

  “I insulted you?” Brockton said. “Let me make it up to you.”

  “That’s not why I’m here.”

  “It’s on the house.”

  “All right.”

  “Did you know that The Latin Brothers had a contract out on Gundy?”

  Summer had been so wrapped up with Strickland it hadn’t occurred to her that others could be to blame for Gundy’s death. But she couldn’t let Brockton know this. “I’ve heard things.”

  Brockton laughed skeptically. “For a high class broad, you’re a lousy liar. See my girls over there, soaking up my sun, drinking my booze, snorting my coke, using me for my money? They have three things on their minds: getting high, living the good life, and staying out of jail. I tell you, whores live a lot more honest than you.”

  “I never thought of you as someone interested in truth.”

  “When are you going to leave that dead-end P.D. job and make some real money? Best thing that ever happened to me was getting bounced from the D.A.’s office. I mean, look around, Sugar: five-bedroom home, three bathrooms, Jacuzzi, swimming pool, hot and cold running babes. Money talks, bullshit walks.”