by April Smith
“With you, everything is personal.”
“Damn right. He had her picture on his damn wall.”
“Whose damn picture?”
“Juliana Meyer-Murphy!”
“Good.” Devon bounced the pencil so hard it flew out of his hand. “And she really came through for you at the preliminary hearing.”
“Ohhh, no,” I warned. “Don’t go there unless you really want to piss me off, and I’ll walk out so fast—”
“—You’re not walking anywhere.”
“—I told you not to call her as a witness—”
“—And I told you that you were looking at fifteen years.”
I picked up the pencil from the floor and slammed it down on his desk.
“I wanted that creep dead, or in jail, all right?”
“Well,” he said primly, “you achieved your goal.”
We glared at each other.
“Why am I on the defensive? You know, when we were in court at the prelim, I saw this kid, African-American, who was there with his mom on a drug charge. ‘Something wrong with this justice system,’ he said, and she hit him upside the head. Let me tell you, that boy is my bro now.” Devon pushed the BMW away in disgust. It hit the Porsche.
“It’s a no-brainer, Ana! Rauch doesn’t have a choice; this would be a slam dunk for any prosecutor. You violated bail on an attempted murder charge. Try to see that clearly. You handed it to him! The attempted murder charge is entirely different from the Santa Monica kidnapping. You don’t get extra credit for solving that case just because—” “The credits are nontransferable,” I interrupted sarcastically.
“That’s right. They’re nontransferable.”
We were at a dead end. I was going to jail because I had saved two lives. Devon sighed with deep irritation. I stared defiantly out the window.
“Rauch wants you in custody now. It’s newsworthy, coming on the heels of the arrest of a serial rapist.”
“Great.”
“He’s going for a warrant, the SOB.”
Devon raised himself up from the chair and loped slowly across the room.
“Hip bothering you?”
“Stress.”
“Tell me about it.”
We stood close together, mesmerized by the sparkling traffic; so close, the surface of my skin could sense the tight muscle mass of his worked-out upper body, and at the same time, the effort it took to balance his lower withered side without the crutch.
“Why don’t we sit?” I took his arm in a gesture of reconciliation. Lowering to the couch side by side, we were once more allies in the long winter of a treacherous campaign.
“The best use of our energy,” he said, “is to prepare for trial. Our task right now is to discredit their witnesses. The background reviews are on my desk. Take a look, see if anything pops.”
I sprung up and got it.
There were reports from Devon’s private investigators on the ER doctor who had testified, the thoracic surgeon, Lieutenant Loomis and two other Santa Monica detectives, Margaret Forrester, the Sheriff’s Department stiff who would no doubt say I resisted arrest …
“Margaret Forrester does okay for a police widow,” I said, staring at the bottom line on her IRS form.
“She’s got that business on the side.” Devon rubbed his bald pate. “What is it, jewelry?”
“Seashells. ‘Body ornaments.’ She nets thirty-eight thousand dollars a year?”
“Her stuff is carried by some big stores. Fred Segal. Barneys.” He caught my look. “Surprised?”
“I didn’t think Margaret could get it together to do something like that.”
“She had help getting started. Look at the financial statements.”
I sat beside Devon and his manicured fingertip showed me where. Fourteen months ago Margaret had made a deposit of $52,674 into a money market account.
“Where did she get the dough?”
“Her husband’s pension.”
“Are you sure?”
“The dates connect — the deposit was made a few months after he died.”
“But she stated in court that she was not eligible to receive his pension.”
Devon had both hands on a quad to support the leg while it stretched.
“The husband was killed by a gang.”
“He was killed off-duty, and they never proved it was a gang. It was never crystal clear to me how exactly the Hat died.”
“We’ll get it clear.” Devon made a note, glanced at his watch.
“How long do I have before the marshals show up at the door?”
“We’ll file for a hearing. It will be postponed.”
“How long,” I insisted, “can you keep the balls in the air?”
“I can’t say for sure—”
“Because Mike Donnato kicked me out of his house.”
Devon stopped writing. “When did this happen?”
“A couple of days before the Brennan thing went down.”
I told him about the threatening phone calls and Mike’s kids.
“You’d have to ask for new terms and conditions anyway.”
Devon looked seriously unhappy now. “I hate giving Rauch another fat one over the plate. Can you find someone else of equal stature to stay with?”
“You mean someone else from the Bureau who will vouch for me?”
Devon looked up. The blue stone in the pen matched the intensified blue of his eyes. He meant it. He was not being ironic.
“Is there anyone?” he asked.
Instead of ducking suavely into the Bureau garage, I had to wait in the visitors’ section of the outdoor parking lot, signal flashing, while a family of Russian immigrants squeezed into a slouching old yellow Mercedes sedan in the midst of a whopping intergenerational argument. I gave a toot and eight stormy faces glared at me with unified indignation. I guess that ended the argument.
Sprinting up the steps to the US Federal Office Building, I was ambushed once again by the same stomach-tightening anticipation I had felt every day on the job. Of course, they would not have let me past reception. Nor could I have tolerated the looks of rank curiosity, had I run into people I knew, hustling in a group to a meeting, peering out from behind an attachment they took for granted, or even begrudged, while I wanted nothing but to belong. Better to stay outside, lost in the impersonal scale of the flat-faced building, another ordinary citizen wearing ripped-in-the-pocket Levi’s and running shoes, entitled to the safeguards of democracy.
The Human Computer would take lunch between twelve and one, hurry across the sunshiny plaza into the fumes of the garage and down the cinder-block passage to the ancient and pungent gym. Now that I thought about it, why should hardworking agents be condemned to that claustrophobic space? Even the franchise health club across the street had a view of Wilshire Boulevard. They should do better. They deserved it.
They.
“Barbara!”
She was carrying the black Lancôme tote bag we both had gotten “free” the day we ditched work and went to Robinsons and spent hundreds of dollars on makeup.
“Mother of God!” she gasped. “You scared me.”
“Can I walk with you? Pretend I’m a homeless person.”
“Don’t make me feel guilty.”
“For what?”
“Not calling you.” She squinted against the sun. “I’m sorry. With a new baby your life isn’t your own.”
“Hey.”
We avoided each other’s eyes.
“Outstanding job on the serial rapist,” she said finally.
“Thank you. Deirdre good?”
Barbara’s face lit up. “Almost walking. Cruising on the furniture, you know …” Then her voice dropped, as if I wouldn’t know. “So where are you off to?”
“Jail.”
She laughed. “Oh, come on!”
“No joke. Mark Rauch is arguing to revoke bail as we speak.”
“Why on earth—?”
“Violation of the agreement. Be
cause I went after Brennan.”
“What a crock.”
People kept padding by. Overweight men wearing windbreakers and carrying briefcases. Tiny Asian grandmothers in black. Suddenly I knew I could never ask her to take me into her home.
“Well … I just wanted to say hi. See your smiling face.”
She saw the hurt and put her arms around me. “I feel so bad for not calling.”
“Don’t,” I sniffled. “You’re not the only one.”
“Tell me. Quickly. How are they going to argue? I have to interview another new baby-sitter, or else I’d—”
“It’s okay. Another time.”
“No! I don’t care, she’ll quit in a month when her boyfriend gets back from Tibet.”
“Tibet?”
She blocked my way. “I want to hear.”
“It’s over for me, Barbara. I’m looking at hard time, for real.”
She insisted on that zany Catholic optimism. “What is Devon County doing for you, right now?”
“Background checks on witnesses.”
“So he’s just getting started!”
I snorted. “It’s great bedtime reading. The dirt on the dirtbags. Remember that Margaret Forrester, the dame Andrew slept with — one of many — at the Santa Monica police? I told you about her.”
“Kind of.”
“She’s the one who ratted me out.”
“Jealous?”
“A nutcase. Turns out she’s making a ton of money selling seashell jewelry to yuppie stores …”
“Aside from the police job?”
“She was awarded $52,674 when her husband died in the line of duty, although apparently—”
Barbara pushed the blowing hair out of her eyes. “When was this?”
“A year and a half ago. Why?”
She had that Barbara look.
“It’s a funny number, that’s all.”
“How funny?”
The Human Computer is never wrong about numbers. Never wrong about anything that has happened during a bank robbery, if it is in our files, in the last five years.
“That’s the same take as the Mission Impossible caper.”
“The exact amount the suspect took from the bank?”
Barbara nodded, brows furrowed with concentration.
“There was more in the safe deposit boxes, but he didn’t find it or he didn’t have time …”
The details of the robbery would have continued to spit out like runaway ticker tape if I had not stopped them by suddenly gripping her arms.
“Oh, Barbara,” I whispered.
Barbara ditched the baby-sitter and came with me to the apartment in the Marina because, she said, it would not be a good idea to go back there for the first time alone.
The key turned happily, as always, in the brass faceplate that was worn yellow in the spot where the rest of the keys had hit every day for the past ten years. These are the marks we leave on the world.
“They wouldn’t trash it,” Barbara kept promising during the drive, but still I pictured desolation and ruin left by the crime scene techs. When we got there I hesitated with the key, giggling foolishly, because I was afraid that once we opened the door the loss would be overwhelming.
All that was missing was a piece of carpet, a neat surgical square out of the center of the living room where there must have been bloodstains, but there were black fingerprint powder smudges left on the walls, and the furniture had been moved and put back in a haphazard way. It looked as if they had been messing around in the garbage disposal. Like Juliana overcome by brutal flashbacks, I was hit with spiking memories of the destruction that had happened here, as if nameless obliteration were still shaking the floor, as if Andrew and I had been citizens caught in some mistaken blitz: What in the name of God did we do to each other?
“Don’t cry,” said Barbara briskly. She dropped her purse on the glass dining table and strode to the windows and yanked the curtains back. “Let’s get some air in here.”
When the light swept in, and the white-hot view of the brilliant boats and the sharp smell of kelp and gasoline, I saw the place was still mine — the bamboo furniture I had chosen, the TV with its trusty remote — but were I ever to live there again, room would have to be made now for a smoky melancholy. I could not even look in the direction of the coffee table and the couch.
“Where do you keep your plastic bags?”
I pulled out the drawer for Barbara, who was brave enough to open the refrigerator. “Don’t worry, I’ll take care of this. You do what you have to do,” she instructed, holding out the Baggies.
I stared at the box with the certainty that we had reached the end, the place in the river so treacherous it could not be crossed.
“I can’t do this to him.”
“Do you want your home back? How about your freedom? He’s more than ready to take your freedom away from you.”
In the bathroom, the bars of soap were shriveled and dry and the towels were gone, taken for evidence. I had to hold on to the wall as the image came of Andrew and me playing in the shower before work, teasing who would get to rinse their hair first, bending to lather his strong long toes and legs, working my way up, warm water pulsing on my back.
As I stared into the mirror it seemed to fog up with that very steam, and then, as if I had wiped that steam away, I saw in an arc of clarity, Andrew and me. Our hair was wet, cheeks ruddy, his big naked shoulders inches higher than mine; we were ritually washed for the workday, but no longer playful — rather, patient and solemn, as we had never really been. I steadied myself and the impression faded. Two toothbrushes still hung in the holder. One green and one blue. His and hers.
Andrew had bought the green one, fastidious Andrew, who kept a change of clothes in the car, whose tools were always clean and hung in rows. Solitary Andrew, whose mind worked like a clock, with ruthless omission of whatever it is that must be left out.
Ruthless?
I removed the green toothbrush and slipped it into the plastic bag, allowing myself to hear only the part of my mind that was quickly calibrating which route would be fastest to the forensic lab in Fullerton this time of day.
Twenty-seven
The azaleas in front of Andrew’s house were trimmed as usual into perfect ovals of red, white and pink, like mounds of psychedelic candy brightly pulsating along the path to the door. The path was newly wet and fragrant with cedar chips still moist in the shade of a mimosa tree, whose featherlike leaflets trailed languorously in light ocean airs. Everything would be in working order — the tight screen door, the chiming bell — and it would take several more seconds for him to unsnap all the locks and chains. In those seconds we could still turn back.
But then he was standing there, with nothing between us, vivid and three-dimensional in the immediate plane: greasy day-off hair, old sweats with cutoff sleeves, as if popped there whole. Behind him I could sense dark wood and cool rooms, and the poignant scent of gardenias was blowing across the interior through open patio doors.
“What’s up?”
I could have handled the cop face much better, the shut-down superior detachment, but instead he was giving off uneasy suspicion, as any home owner would, to find an unpleasant character from the past unexpectedly on his doorstep.
“Can I talk to you?”
There it was, the scan, the intuitive check for psychotic unpredictable vibes. No, he decided, it was just Ana, as surprisingly flesh-and-blood ordinary as he.
“Want to come in?”
“Are you in the middle of something?”
“Just working out.”
Stiff-legged, I crossed the threshold and hovered by the back of a couch, fingers scratching at the cracked leather.
“Want something to drink?”
“I’m fine.”
Twenty-pound barbells had been taken from the rack near the sliding glass doors and were resting on the dhurrie rug.
“Sorry to interrupt.”
“I wasn’t exac
tly on a roll. Hard getting back.”
“I know what you mean,” and let it fade.
He was still shockingly underweight. His cheeks were stubbled and gaunt, the biceps that showed out of the cutoffs were not Andrew’s iron signature, but belonged to a different man, a sick man, the flesh of the muscles deflated and pale.
“I’m sorry,” I said again, and willed myself not to flee.
“Sure I can’t get you something? Coffee? Juice?”
“Maybe just some water. My throat is kind of dry.”
“It’s dry,” he agreed. “Come on in.”
The kitchen was just the same — spotless Mexican tile and family-size jug of dishwashing liquid on the wiped-down aluminum sink. Plants in the window, a white embroidered valance above the plants. The reason the curtains went so well with the house was they had been his mother’s, still starched by the same cleaning lady.
He pulled a bottle from the pantry and tore off the cellophane.
“Oh. Did you want ice?”
I shook my head and drank the water.
“Look, I don’t know how to say this.”
“I can’t drop the charges,” he interrupted. “Even though you got Brennan. It’s in the prosecution’s hands.”
The sincerity and swiftness of it caught me off guard, as if he had been waiting for me to show up just to say this.
“I wouldn’t even suggest that.”
“Once it got rolling, there was nothing I could do.”
“Of course. I know.”
“I never gave you up.”
He had begun to breathe hard and through the nose with little snorting sounds and his finger pointed at my heart.
“I did not give you up. I wouldn’t do that.”
“It didn’t matter anyway, because—”
“Yes, it does. It does matter. Even at the hospital. When they came to me, ready to go out and kick ass, I still gave them cock-and-bull about who did it.”
“I know, and I’ll never forget.” My voice broke, and I had to clamp my fingers over my lips. “Anyway, there was Margaret.”
“There was Margaret,” he affirmed with no attempt to hide the bitterness.
“She told them it was me.”
His voice was thick. “She thought she had something to protect.”