The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

  He stared at her, slightly dumbfounded. She herself didn’t seem much removed from high school.

  “What’s up with the hoodie?” he asked. “You in training for the World Series of Poker or something?”

  He had a feeling the reference might go over her head—and it did. Or at least she let it blow right past her.

  “Oh no,” she said, “I just didn’t want my music to bother you. I know I leak.”

  She shifted a little in her chair, allowing him to get a glimpse of her screen. He felt his stomach drop, for there was a blog post about Mark McGregor’s new company, with a shot of him reclined in a modern, high-backed office chair, smiling with despicable confidence. The site, OneDumbIdea.com, covered start-ups. It was run by Tom Bender, a pompous but audaciously talented asshole Richie had met a couple of times at networking events. That was back in the day when Bender’s site was in its fledgling state and nobody thought too much of it. Now the bastard had apparently become the gossip arbiter of all things Valley.

  “What are you working on?” he asked testily.

  “Background check.”

  “On who?”

  “You.”

  If it was a joke, he didn’t think it was funny.

  “Kidding,” she said. “Well, sort of anyway. Lourdes wanted me to check on a few things. She likes you.”

  “What’d she say?”

  “She didn’t say anything. I can just tell.”

  “Do you have any say in the hiring process?”

  “I should think so. I do good work. They value my opinion.”

  “I had a bad feeling you were going to say that.”

  She smiled, looking at him more closely. Why did she think everything he said was amusing?

  “Okay, I see it more now,” she announced after a moment.

  “See what?”

  “The Frank connection. I see how you can pull it off.”

  “The hat and suit get me sixty percent of the way there.”

  “And the rest?”

  “Attitude.”

  “Me, too,” she said.

  “I see that.”

  “Well, you’ve got the eyes. The color anyway.”

  “She really have you backgrounding me?” He knew they’d be combing through his history, but it seemed oddly insulting to do it right in front of him.

  “Don’t take it personally. They did it for me, too. They do it for everybody.”

  “You look clean.”

  “Pretty much,” she said. “When I was sixteen, I had an open-container violation. And a cop once ticketed me for not having my headlights on as I was leaving a lighted shopping-mall parking lot at night. That’s the extent of my run-ins with the law. Kinda pathetic, right?”

  “Where was sixteen?”

  She cocked her head a little, not quite understanding him. “Oh, that’s an odd way to put it.” Mulling it over, she seemed to approve of the phrasing. “Sixteen was Danville,” she said. “Eighteen was UC Irvine. Twenty-four is now. Bad time to find a job. Half my friends are unemployed or teaching English in Costa Rica. I was lucky. I wanted to be an investigative reporter. Had an internship for a couple of summers at a lefty blog where they were focused on old-fashioned muckraking. But they didn’t have any paying positions. At least this pays and I’ve trained under a couple of really great investigators. Same skill set, just no articles. You know, we already have forty applications for this shitty little open position.”

  “Try making license plates for thirty-eight cents an hour. It won’t seem so shitty.”

  “Sorry,” she said, momentarily chastised. “I didn’t mean for it to come out like that. I don’t mean to be flip or anything. I’m not a flip person.”

  She fell silent after that. A little while later he went to the bathroom. When he came back and sat down, she asked him whether he’d ever sent in a submission.

  He made a slow swivel in his chair to face her.

  “Maybe.”

  “You did, didn’t you?”

  He shrugged. “I was a poor candidate. White, good legal representation, and my sentence wasn’t supposed to be all that long. I was looking at two years with good behavior. By the time they got something going, if they got something going, I’d be out already. That’s what you tell half these people, don’t you?”

  “But sometimes Marty takes on higher-profile cases.”

  Marty. That made him smile. He liked how Lowenstein was on a first-name basis with everybody. A real man of the people.

  “Marty goes low and high, not higher,” he said. “And when he goes high, he gets in on the ground floor.”

  She didn’t seem to hear his response. Her eyes had settled on something behind him.

  “That lighter,” she said, nodding at his lighter sitting on the desk next to his cell phone. “It’s got Sinatra’s signature. Where’d you get it?”

  He wasn’t sure how she could have seen the signature from where she was sitting. It was pretty small. He guessed she must have looked at it while he was in the bathroom. For someone who seemed awfully introverted at first, she was turning out to be surprisingly inquisitive. He wondered if she’d looked at the inscription on the other side of the lighter. Chances were she hadn’t, because he’d have noticed if she’d moved it even a fraction of an inch. If there was one gift prison had given him besides a better physique, it was a keen sense of object memory. Locked up in cramped quarters, you could end up being very anal about your possessions. You were always taking stock of what you had, where it was, who wanted what, and how those things might help you avert conflict and survive better.

  “Sinatra used to give them out as thank-you gifts,” he said. “You can find them for sale on the Internet.”

  “How much?”

  “Not that much. A few hundred bucks.”

  “You think it’s real?”

  “Probably. But it’s a bullshit little trinket. He gave away lots of them. To get one he actually used, his own personal lighter, that’s a different story.”

  “How would you know he really used it?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe we could get Marty on it for some DNA certification. He could start a little side business to help raise money to get all these poor schmucks out of the can.”

  She let out a little laugh. “You seem a little cynical for someone who’s supposed to be idealistic.”

  “Who said anything about being idealistic?”

  “Why are you here then?”

  “Same reason that innocent high-school intern was here,” he said. “Looks good on the résumé.”

  “I doubt that.”

  “Which part?”

  “Why do you have a lighter if you don’t smoke?”

  “How do you know I don’t smoke?”

  “You have decent skin, no yellow fingernails or teeth, and you don’t smell like a chimney. Deduction: you don’t smoke.”

  “It’s my comfort object,” he said, not totally joking. “I also have a serious fake smoking habit. Part of the act. What’s nice is you get all the benefits of smoking without smoking.”

  “I think I heard that in a Nicorette commercial. You fake drink, too?”

  “No, there I inhale.”

  “Even after what you went through with the accident?”

  “I gave up driving instead.”

  “You don’t have a car?”

  “Or a license.”

  “That guy who was in the car with you … your friend who you said switched places.”

  “What about him?”

  “You ever talk to him?”

  “No. Why would I talk to him?”

  “I don’t know. What happened to him?”

  “Whatever your search engine says happened. I assume you’re quite proficient with Google.”

  She was.

  “Well, what does it say?”

  “It seems like he made out pretty well.”

  “Better than well. Like a bandit, wouldn’t you say?”

  She nodded. A
t that moment Mark McGregor was very much alive and well, and according to the article, launching a new company. The headline said something about a “private beta,” a euphemism for a small group trial.

  “There you go,” he said. “Google’s your friend. Remember that.”

  The room fell silent. At this rate, he thought, you won’t last two days, Richie. Keep it up.

  “Look,” he said, “it’s not something I particularly relish talking about. You know that Guys and Dolls song, ‘Luck Be a Lady’?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, there’s a line in it, ‘A lady doesn’t wander all over the room and blow on some other guy’s dice.’ You know that line?”

  “No, but it sounds kinky.”

  “Well, every time I sing it I have this picture of this dame, you know this femme fatale sort of dame, who comes over and blows on my dice. When you blow on dice, it’s supposed to be for luck, right? Well, my dice got blown on that night and the exact opposite happened. I crapped out. Bad. Simple as that.”

  “Rick?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do you mind if I look into your case a bit?”

  “Why? What’s the point?”

  “I don’t know. To stop you from reciting cheesy lines from old Sinatra show tunes and talking about some chick blowing on your dice.”

  “When you say it like that, it does sound kinky.”

  “Told you,” she said.

  5/ THE MERCY OF YOUR INVESTORS

  WITH THE STREET CORDONED OFF, CAROLYN HAS TO PARK ON VALparaiso and walk back to the entrance of Robert S Drive, where police have set up a barricade. The house is almost at the end of the cul-de-sac on the north side of the street. While it isn’t big enough to be an estate, whoever designed it wanted you to think estate, mini one anyway.

  “It happened over there,” says the young officer with a completely shaved head who escorts her, pointing to a glow of bright lights a little further down the street to the left. She’s not particularly tall, just five-four, and dipping her head slightly at an angle, she looks through the bars of the metal driveway gate. Several yards away she glimpses the unmistakable ponytail of the chief deputy coroner, Greg Lyons, who’s speaking with a black detective she knows named Jerry Burns. A few other people are milling about, some looking more occupied than others. The rest of the property is only illuminated with ground lights here and there, but it’s enough for her to get a sense of the elaborate and meticulous landscaping that surrounds the house.

  She feels herself drawn toward the murder scene but when she starts to drift away from the officer and move a few paces closer to the entrance of the driveway, he warns her to stay with the tour and follow him into the house next door.

  Going inside, she notes that the foyer has a grand, formal feel to it, with light-colored, polished marble floors. The feel isn’t exactly modern—there’s a crystal chandelier hanging from the ceiling after all—but somewhere between modern and traditional. One look at the entranceway and a peek into the living room, and she doesn’t have to see anything more to know that someone clearly spent a lot of money imbuing every inch of that home with that sensibility.

  She can’t help but think that if things had gone a little differently she’d be shacked up in a place like this rather than the “cute” three-bedroom cottage she’s in now. She’d had her chances, of course, but early on had developed a penchant for dating guys with unique and intriguing qualities, particularly good looks, just not large bank accounts. Perhaps the problem was they always seemed to have dual professions separated by a slash. There was the restaurant manager/nutritionist, a mediator/ski instructor, an architect/political blogger, the landscaper who bred huskies and had Iditarod aspirations. She’d tried to break herself of her habit, rotating in a few techie types, they of lofty titles and nonsensical company names, tier-two Boy Wonders. Invariably she found them dull or unattractive—or both. Meanwhile, the “slashes” kept finding her.

  The exception was Ted Cogan, the surgeon. Wealthy, no. Not for around here anyway. But well off, yes, which was just fine with her. The only problem was she’d failed to seal the deal and marry him not once, but twice, and though she doesn’t like to admit it, that second defeat triggered the little tailspin that led to her professional grounding.

  Fuck him, she thinks, glancing up at an arguably exquisite light fixture that’s illuminating the short hallway they’re passing through. Fuck Ted Cogan. And just then a door suddenly opens in front of her, startling and separating her from her escort. It’s a woman coming out of a small bathroom. The two stop just short of colliding.

  “My God, you scared me,” the woman says, clasping her hand to her chest. Pencil thin, around forty-five, with short sandy-colored hair, she isn’t exactly dressed up, but she is well dressed, with khaki slacks and a couple of buttons open on her crisp white blouse to show off a string of white pearls.

  “Sorry,” Carolyn says. “And you are?”

  “Pam Yeagher. I live here. We’re the neighbors. This is just ghastly. Absolutely horrible. You must be Carolyn Dupuy. Beth’s in the den. She’s waiting for you.”

  Out of view, Carolyn hears the young officer talking to a man with a very familiar-sounding voice, though she only realizes it belongs to Jeff Billings, one of the detectives, when she follows Pam Yeagher into the kitchen and sees him standing there.

  “Well, well, if it isn’t Ms. Dupuy,” he says. “Last I heard, you’d been put on hiatus, Counselor.”

  “New season, new show,” she replies, reflexively winding up to return his jab with a bigger shot of her own. “You guys figure out a way to fuck up the crime scene yet? That why they have you stashed over here?”

  Billings face blanches; she’s hit a nerve. “Ask Hank,” he says. “He’s in charge.”

  Last year, she’d caught Billings in a small fib on the stand in a breaking-and-entering case and made him look bad (he’d testified that a piece of evidence was in “plain sight” when in fact it wasn’t). She loves cops but most of them are liars. And they’re arrogant. They think they know who’s guilty and who isn’t, and if they occasionally have to bend their story a bit to make things come out right in the end, well, that’s the way it is. As a prosecutor, she was empathetic. She’d overlooked the fudges, even tacitly approved of them so long as she didn’t think they’d come back to bite her in the ass. But now it’s different. Now it’s her job to make them bite back. And leave marks.

  “Your perimeter isn’t wide enough,” she says to antagonize him further. “You’ve got all kinds of people over there destroying possible evidence.”

  He forces a smile and sticks his thumbs in the belt loops on either side of his hips.

  “Sure they are,” he says, smiling, not taking the bait.

  Neither the young officer nor the Yeagher woman, who’s standing just to her left, knows what to make of the exchange.

  “I’m just going to get a glass of water for Beth,” Pam says. “My husband’s in there with her. He’s a doctor. I’ll take you in.”

  A doctor? thinks Carolyn. Are you kidding me? A fucking doctor’s house? That’s just goddamn perfect.

  “I’ll give you ten minutes,” Billings says.

  “And I’ll see your ten minutes and take as long as I like.”

  “We need to question her, Carolyn.”

  “So do I.”

  With that, she heads into the den. When she enters, Beth Hill doesn’t look up. She’s sitting on a beautiful chocolate-colored leather couch with her knees pulled up to her chest and her head pressed against her forearms, quietly sobbing. She’s wearing black yoga stretch pants and a white T-shirt that’s covered by a gray crocheted cardigan. Her feet are bare.

  Pam Yeagher’s husband, the doctor, also neatly dressed and more well put together than good-looking, has his hand on her back and is doing his best to comfort her, murmuring something inaudible in her ear. His hair is almost completely gray, which makes him seem a few years older than his wife, though they’re c
learly contemporaries.

  “Harry,” Pam says quietly to her husband. “This is Carolyn Dupuy. The lawyer she called.”

  With that Beth looks up at her, then stands up, excited to see her. Carolyn extends her hand but Beth goes right past it, opting for a full embrace.

  “Thanks for coming,” she says, hugging her tightly.

  Under the circumstances she should have expected it. Nevertheless the show of affection feels awkward. She’d always remember the woman’s piercing stare in court all those years ago when she was part of the team that prosecuted Beth’s fiancé for killing a young woman in a drunk-driving accident. Now they’re just acquaintances who see each other in passing in town or at the tennis club where Cogan is a member.

  Despite exchanging pleasantries when they crossed paths, Beth always came across as distant, and Carolyn always wondered what she was like under the veneer. Some days she had an urge to come right out and ask her. You hate my guts, don’t you? Go ahead; tell me, it’s okay. But something always stopped her. Once, a friend walked up just as she was about to ask. Another time she was all set to approach when she caught a glimpse of Cogan chatting up some bimbo by the snack bar and became enraged, forgetting about Beth.

  Luckily, while the embrace is forceful, it’s short, and once Beth relinquishes her grip, she sits back down on the leather sofa. Carolyn notices the doctor mouthing the word “water” to his wife and making a shooing motion with his hand, seemingly encouraging her to complete the mission he’d sent her on, unaware she’d already set the glass on the console to the left, beside a set of family pictures that show off the exploits of the couple’s two college-age kids, son and daughter. The gesture indicates that Dr. Harry has had lots of experience dealing with crisis situations and has little tolerance for those who don’t. It bothers Carolyn that he’s essentially treating his wife like a nurse. The guy’s a controller, she thinks.