The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

  Now that he was out, he sometimes got the same sort of empty feeling. At one or two in the morning, he’d go over to little Rincon Park, a small grassy area near the water where a giant, somewhat gaudy bow-and-arrow sculpture called Cupid’s Span was stuck in the ground at an angle. He’d talk to the homeless people who’d stop in there. Some of them were shockingly regular people and others were total mental cases. So far, no one had bothered him. Maybe because even the wackos sensed you weren’t quite right if you were standing around in a parka looking up at the Bay Bridge in the middle of the night.

  “Can’t jump off that one,” he remembered one guy saying to him, in all seriousness. “The one you want is further down the road.”

  His cell phone dinged. Text from Ashley: “K. We’re good.”

  The scuba knife was on the kitchen counter tucked away in its hard black plastic sheath, looking harmless enough. He picked it up and quickly strapped it to his ankle and headed out, the door automatically swinging shut behind him. It took a little less than a minute to take the elevator down one flight and make his way out of the building. He saw Ashley and her boyfriend as he came out. They were standing on the other side of Brannan (the same side the car was parked on) but back toward the corner.

  Without acknowledging them he crossed the street and turned left toward the car. The driver saw him coming through his side-view mirror but Richie didn’t go up to the car on the driver’s side. Instead, he passed behind the car and onto the sidewalk. As he walked past the car, he heard both doors open almost at the same time. He took a few more steps, then pulled up abruptly and turned around. The two guys stopped in their tracks, a little startled.

  “Hey,” he said, “you guys heading out anytime soon? My friend’s coming in a minute and looking for a space.”

  “We’re not going anywhere, bro,” said the driver. He had a longish, straggly soul patch protruding from a spot under his lower lip. He was the smaller of the two, but he made up for his lack of stature with a menacing stare. Definitely Pacific Islander, Richie thought. Probably Tongan. “Where are you going?”

  “Why would you care?”

  “We have a message for you,” Soul Patch said.

  “From whom?”

  “From someone who cares about your well-being.”

  Richie smiled.

  “You two don’t seem like the caring types.”

  Soul Patch: “Oh, we are, bro.”

  “What’s the message?”

  “Go fuck yourself. No one’s paying you shit.”

  He looked at them incredulously.

  “Excuse me.”

  “Not a dime.”

  “Who says so?”

  “Who do you think says so?”

  “I’m not a fucking mind reader.”

  “You know who,” the big one said, making his first contribution to the conversation. His voice wasn’t as intimidating as his stature, which was probably why he didn’t speak.

  “Sure, I do.”

  “And stay away from the bitch,” Soul Patch came back. “We know she’s in on this.”

  “The bitch?”

  “Yeah, if you go near her again, if you contact her in any way, the next message we deliver won’t be so friendly.”

  Richie started laughing.

  The thicker one took a step closer. “What’s so funny?” He was a real beast. Not big enough to play pro football but maybe college, D2. Could have played linebacker or fullback. Big as he was, though, he didn’t look like gang material. The guy was wearing a black short-sleeve T-shirt and didn’t have any visible tattoos on his forearms or neck.

  “You assholes,” he said. “That’s what’s funny. Who the hell are you? Stay away from the bitch,” he said, mocking their menacing tone. “What’s up with that?”

  The guy took another step forward and was now really in his face. He was literally breathing down on him, coffee breath and all, his nose at forehead level, ripe as hell for a head butt. But the smaller guy, Mr. Soul Patch, pulled his partner away. The guy budged, not much, but enough to put some distance between them.

  “Perhaps we should refresh your memory,” Soul Patch said, suddenly sounding almost British.

  He motioned for his buddy to get something from the car. Funny how the little ones always seem to order the big oafs around, Richie thought. The big guy went back to the Flex and returned with a manila envelope and handed it to Richie, who opened it and took out three eight by ten photos. They were shots of a woman with short blond hair walking out of his building. His eyes opened wide. He couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. The “bitch” was Beth. Or rather Beth with short blond hair.

  “That was taken two afternoons ago,” the smaller guy said.

  He stared at the photo, then compared the front of the building in the image to the real one he could see from where he was standing. The photos looked like they were taken from just a few feet closer to the corner, but it was basically the same vantage point. It was hard to argue, they looked authentic, but he still didn’t think they were real.

  “This is bullshit,” he said. “I haven’t spoken to Beth Hill in over a year. I haven’t seen her in close to four years.”

  Soul Patch snatched the photos from him.

  “No, you’re the one who’s full of shit, bro.”

  Both his new friends laughed. He wasn’t sure why they thought that was funny, but they did.

  “How long have you guys been following me?”

  Soul Patch: “Longer than you think.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “An old friend who doesn’t take kindly to threats. You had a chance to resolve this amicably before you got out. The offer was quite generous.”

  “That’s why he sent you? Because he says I threatened him?”

  “Yeah, you and the bitch have cooked this shit up. And we’re here to tell you it’s not gonna work, understand? No money, cuz. ATM out of service.”

  With that, the linebacker decided to add a little extra vigor to the verbal response. You could see it in his eyes: he’d been itching the whole time to rush the passer and tick off a sack on the stat sheet. All that time on the bench, waiting in the car, sipping lattes had gotten to him. He just couldn’t contain himself anymore.

  He grabbed Richie by the top of the shirt and shoved him into the side of the building, just to the left of the entrance to a wine store. As the top of his back met the wall, Richie felt his breath go out of him. But the guy made the mistake of not pinning him there because as hard as he hit, Richie bounced right back, slammed his forehead into the guy’s nose and drove his knee into his groin almost at the same time. The first hit left him blinded, the second buckled his knees, and as he fell to a heap on the ground, Richie looked over and saw a woman pushing a baby stroller about ten yards away, frozen in the middle of the sidewalk, a horrified look on her face.

  Richie motioned for her to back off, then turned his attention to Soul Patch, who seemed as shocked by the turn of events as the woman with the stroller. If the guy had a gun, Richie thought, now was the time for him to use it.

  “Tell your boss that if I wanted his money, I’d take it.”

  Soul Patch flashed him an intense look. Searing. “You really shouldn’t have done that, bro.”

  The guy on the ground noticed that his nose was bleeding. “Fucker broke my nose,” he said, picking himself up. A little stream of blood was running from the right nostril down the top of his lip and into his mouth.

  “I didn’t break shit. That was a love tap.”

  “We could put you back in prison,” Soul Patch said. “You understand that, don’t you?”

  “And I could put you both in the hospital. Or better yet, I got a couple of friends who’ll take you on a nice boat ride out on the Bay. You ever been to the Farallons? They’ve got great whites out there. The size of minivans. They usually put you in a protective cage and don’t chum, but in your case, they’d make an exception.”

  “This is your only warnin
g, Mr. Forman,” Soul Patch said.

  “And this is yours, too. Now get your piece-of-shit fake gangster vehicle out of here before I call the police.”

  He started to walk away, continuing to face them as he made his exit. By the time he got to the corner they’d returned to their car. A moment later they pulled out onto Brannan and headed over to the Embarcadero, where they made a right turn. Richie was repeating the license plate ID to himself as Jason and Ashley approached.

  “Holy shit,” Jason said. “What was that about?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said. “Something weird’s going on. What’d you get?”

  Jason handed him his camera and showed him which button to push to scroll through the images on the LCD. Richie’s hand shook a little as he flipped through the images. His heart was still racing.

  “You okay?” Ashley asked, noticing the tremor.

  “Yeah,” he said. Jason had nice shots of the license plate and had also managed to snap a dozen or so shots of his new friends handing him the manila envelope. You could see him looking at the photos of Beth, but only one or two shots clearly revealed what was in the photos and it was hard to tell just how good the focus was. He wanted to see them blown up on a bigger screen.

  “Who’s the woman?” Ashley asked.

  “My ex-fiancée.”

  “Beth?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That looks like it was taken right here. When did you see her?”

  “I didn’t. Or at least I think I didn’t.”

  “What does that mean?”

  He wasn’t listening. He was looking at the photo of the photo. There was something incredibly eerie about it. It was as if someone had taken a picture of a scene in one of his dreams and now it had somehow found its way into the real, physical world.

  “What did those guys want?” Ashley asked.

  He told her he didn’t know, even though he did. Or at least he thought he did. Someone appeared to be trying to blackmail Mark. But who? And how much were they were looking for? At the same time, he wondered whether it had anything to with what Ashley was up to, poking around on his old case. At his request, he’d told her he didn’t want to hear about it, but now he was a lot more interested.

  “Ash, who’ve you been talking to about my stuff?”

  “Why?”

  “Just who.”

  “A couple people. Mainly court clerks and I’ve been trying to track down the woman who was in the vehicle you hit. The friend.”

  She looked at Jason, who gave her a hard look back. Richie saw her bite her lip nervously, a tell if he’d ever seen one. Poker wasn’t her game after all.

  He looked at her, waiting.

  “Tell him,” Jason finally said.

  “Okay,” Ashley said. “We were down there the other day.”

  “Down where?”

  “Down on the Peninsula. Menlo Park.”

  “Doing what?”

  “As I said, talking to a few folks. Down at the court.”

  “And we shot a little,” Jason said. “We filmed some.”

  “Some what?” Richie asked.

  “Well, just the scene of the accident. There’s still a marker there. You know, alongside the road. A cross.”

  Richie shook his head. He’d seen the cross a long time ago but hadn’t realized it was still there.

  “I’m sorry,” Ashley said. “We should have told you. But you said you didn’t want to know what I was doing.”

  No wonder they were in such a hurry to get over with their camera, he thought. They’re making a fucking documentary.

  “You okay, Rick?” Ashley asked.

  He looked at her, then at Jason.

  “I’m going to need a copy of those pictures,” he said. “And from now on, I need to know everything that’s going on. Everything. Understand?”

  7/ THE NUANCES OF HATE

  MADDEN HAS ALWAYS FELT BAD FOR BETH HILL. IF THERE WAS A victim aside from the women in that Toyota Corolla, it was Beth. Her wedding was cancelled at the last minute, her life plans dashed, and she wasn’t in either car, though there were times when she must have wished she was. Then she might have known exactly what happened that night.

  A faded white cross still stands there, a memorial to the accident, planted on the embankment just feet from where he first encountered Mark McGregor. A couple of times a year, someone, probably the family of the victim, comes by and hangs a wreath of flowers on the cross. The only time he really notices the marker is during the few weeks the wreath has color; otherwise it sort of blends in with the dirt on the shoulder.

  That open stretch of Sand Hill Road between the 280 off-ramp and Sharon Heights has always attracted its share of mishaps, though the injured are mainly bicyclists, not drivers. Everything west of the freeway is Woodside. East is Menlo Park. And after making the loop off the highway, the road runs downhill and the cars really get going, especially late at night when traffic is light.

  Years ago Sand Hill was largely undeveloped. It was all Stanford land; the university owned it. Then one day it became too valuable. Now there is a luxury hotel next to the freeway and all the venture capital firms, most of them anyway, have set up shop along on the north side of the road. There aren’t as many businesses on the south side because the mile-long Stanford Linear Accelerator has been there since the sixties. That’s where the two women in the crushed vehicle worked.

  At approximately 12:52 that night their Toyota Corolla pulled out from the entrance of SLAC to make a left onto Sand Hill (going west toward Woodside) and an old Cadillac convertible ran a red light and slammed into the driver’s side of the smaller car, hitting it almost flush, T-boning it. The driver of the Cadillac hit the brakes at the last second but the skid marks weren’t longer than ten feet.

  An officer showed up within six minutes of the accident. Four patrol cars were out that night, each patrolling within a zone. Typically, most of the action took place on the east side of town, the majority of it closer to the 101 freeway, where the town’s pocket of ethnicity, Belle Haven, met East Palo Alto, which, during the crack epidemic of the nineties, had earned the distinction of having the highest per capita murder rate in the country. One car was patrolling quieter West Menlo, but the zone was actually pretty large in terms of square miles, and when the 911 call for the accident came in, the nearest officer was a good three miles away.

  He found the driver of the Cadillac groaning and bleeding from the side of his head. Lab tests would later reveal that his blood-alcohol level was just north of 0.12, clearly over the legal limit of 0.08. Meanwhile, the passenger, who was wearing a seat belt, was conscious but dazed. Tests would later reveal his blood alcohol content was within the legal limit.

  Tapes from a San Francisco parking garage showed Beth Hill’s fiancé, Richie Forman, driving the car out of the garage. The officer at the scene of the accident identified Forman as the driver. Blood on the steering wheel and driver’s seat matched Forman’s. And yet Forman, saddened as he was for the victims and their families, said he wasn’t driving. Yes, he took his car out of the garage, but he just drove it a few blocks to pick up his friend Mark McGregor, who he’d left talking to a woman in a bar. McGregor had asked for the car keys, telling him he was in no shape to drive all the way back down to the Peninsula. Forman didn’t know what had happened, but he said he wasn’t behind the wheel of the car that killed that woman and injured her friend. His friend must have moved him after the accident, switched places with him.

  At his trial months later, after nearly two hours of questioning, after going through every last detail of that night, not twice, but five times, Carolyn Dupuy, the deputy DA cross-examining Forman, got what she was looking for on the stand. It wasn’t exactly a confession, but a moment of doubt, a brief hesitation, and an admission that he couldn’t be 100 percent sure he wasn’t behind that wheel.

  Forman’s lawyer tried to suppress his answer, but it was too late; it was there, and that moment, when you played it over an
d over to a jury, started to sound longer and more profound. It started to sound like a confession. And that’s how Richie Forman ended up with a felony manslaughter conviction. With gross negligence thrown in, he got three to seven and a ticket to a civil lawsuit. Few bachelor parties had ever cost as much as his.

  If the jury didn’t believe him, did Beth Hill? During the trial, she’d sat impassively in the gallery with a mostly helpless, drained look on her gaunt face. She had the appearance of someone who hadn’t gotten a full night’s sleep in weeks, maybe months, and hadn’t been eating enough.

  “I know Richie better than anyone,” she told a reporter. “He’s not someone who lies. And he’s not someone who backstabs his friends. So, no, he wouldn’t accuse a good friend of doing something so nefarious as to pull him into the driver’s seat unless it was true. He wouldn’t do something like this just so he could stay out of jail.”

  The only problem was Beth Hill was good-looking. Very good-looking—in a natural way that wasn’t manufactured. Even if the people who knew her before the accident said she appeared haggard at the trial, when she took the stand to describe her communications with Forman that evening, the rest of the world—and those jurors—thought she was beautiful. She was fairly tall, with long dark hair, a clear complexion, and elegant, slender hands that her stress-induced weight loss only seemed to accentuate.

  Madden remembered overhearing one of the elderly jurors say after the trial that Beth reminded him of Katharine Ross in The Graduate. Another said she looked like a model. Whatever the case, when you saw her there, reticent yet forceful, demurely pulling strands of hair away from her eyes between questions, you indeed thought a guy like Richie Forman—any guy really—would say whatever it took not to lose her.

  Now, looking at her sitting on the couch next to Carolyn in the Yeaghers’ den, Madden still has the same sentiment. Yes, her forehead has a few more lines and her hair is short—dramatically so—and bleached blond. But she’s as pretty as ever.