The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

  “This guy Bender,” Crowley says, “I hear he may have a little ax to grind. Maybe we can provide a little context to the media if we get any questions.”

  Bender used to have some pretty big parties, which his neighbors frequently called the police to complain about. The MPPD had paid at least ten visits to his previous home, and Bender, who was fond of the expression “What you do in your own home is your own business,” hadn’t exactly been accommodating. He’d ended up paying several fines and had to make a court appearance or two.

  “I told Dick about the citations,” Pastorini says. “Between him and his mother—”

  Crowley: “Who’s his mother?”

  “A life coach,” Madden says, glad to shift the conversation. “Or at least that’s what she calls herself. Does nude group sessions in her backyard. Cleansings.”

  Crowley lifts an eyebrow. “I think I heard about this.”

  “Neighbors complained about her, too,” Madden goes on. “Didn’t like that she was running a business out of her home.”

  “And that she couldn’t get more attractive clients,” Pastorini deadpans.

  “Look, I’ll take care of him,” Madden says after a moment.

  “How?” Crowley asks.

  “Give him what he wants.”

  “What’s that?”

  “An exclusive. He likes to be first. For him, it’s all about being first. He’s a scoop whore.”

  “An exclusive on what?” Pastorini asks, obviously concerned about what information he’s going to release.

  “Let me think about it. But I think he can be useful.”

  They both look at him like he’s off his rocker.

  “Is that a real term, ‘scoop whore’?” Crowley asks. “Or did you just make it up?”

  “I don’t know. I might have.”

  With that, Madden says he has to go.

  “I’ll be back in an hour,” he says. “I gotta check on something with Lyons. He might have something.”

  “What?”

  “He said he found a couple of needle marks, one on each arm.”

  “So the guy was a user?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what I gotta find out.”

  14/ BLINDSIDES

  AT A LITTLE AFTER NINE IN THE MORNING CAROLYN HEADS OUT TO pick up Beth. She’d put her in the Rosewood Sand Hill Hotel under the name of the neighbor, Pam Yeagher, who’d trailed behind them in her car and spent the night in the room with Beth in the second bed.

  Carolyn had picked the hotel because she knew it well. Pretentiously casual, it was a favored meeting spot of wealthy venture capitalists, entrepreneurs, and other business leaders, and she had a friend who sometimes came down from the city and stayed there for a night or two to take in a few spa treatments and, hopefully, land a “lifelong investor,” which she’d shortened to the more text-friendly LLI.

  Carolyn likes how the hotel’s a little bit out of the way, right next to the 280 freeway off Sand Hill, rather than closer to downtown, and feels more like a hotel you’d find in the southwest; picturesque, with views of the Santa Cruz mountains—“Napa light” as her friend fondly calls it.

  That the hotel is just up the road from the entrance to the Stanford Linear Accelerator, where the accident had occurred all those years ago, hadn’t factored into her decision, but that was because she hadn’t considered it until she pulled her car onto Sand Hill the night before. Her hands had tensed little on the wheel as they passed through the intersection, but Beth, sitting next to her in the passenger seat, didn’t react or show any emotion. She just kept staring straight ahead.

  At nine thirty in the morning, Beth and Pam are waiting for her in the hotel’s restaurant, plates of half-eaten food strewn about their table. In their black leggings, fleece pullovers, and running shoes, they both look ready to work out. The large restaurant, with its high, arched ceiling, has just a smattering of patrons, several of whom are eating alone, reading newspapers, or checking email on their phones.

  Carolyn asks Beth how she’s doing.

  “Okay,” Beth says. “And not.”

  “She actually slept really well,” Pam remarks as if she’d been by her bedside, monitoring her all night. “Did you eat already? Do you want some coffee?”

  Carolyn has already decided she really doesn’t like Pam, though she can’t quite put her finger on why. The woman seems boxed in, harried, and insecure all at once, yet she has this irritatingly perky disposition. Carolyn feels she’s compensating for something—or perhaps coping is the kinder way to put it. She senses her relationship with her husband is far from copacetic. And while she sympathizes with her plight on a certain level she doesn’t have the time or patience to deal with it now.

  “If you don’t mind, Pam, I’ve got to talk to Beth alone. We need to head to the police station in a little while.”

  “You want me to leave?”

  As quickly as possible. “Yes. And I mean that in the politest way.”

  “Oh.” She seems a little shocked. “Okay.”

  After some hugs and naive, clichéd parting words (“Everything is going to be okay, I promise”) she’s on her way, her purse tucked under one arm, a to-go cup of coffee in her other hand.

  “She means well,” Beth says when she’s gone. “She just tries too hard sometimes.”

  “Sometimes?”

  “Okay, all the time. But we’ve had some good talks. She needs a friend.”

  “Her husband fools around, doesn’t he?”

  “It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “How so?”

  “He wants her to fool around with him.”

  “Oh.” Carolyn considers that a moment. “You mean swing?”

  Beth nods. “She tried it a few times but she’s having trouble with it.”

  “I can see that.”

  Not much surprises Carolyn anymore. Still, she had Harry Yeagher pegged as more of a bang-a-nurse-on-the-sly kind of guy, not a wife swapper. This scenario is better, but only if everyone is on board with the program. Poor woman, she thinks.

  The check comes. After Beth settles up, Carolyn asks whether she has any preference where they talk. Does she want to find a more private lounge area?

  Beth looks away, absently staring out the window at a terrace that has a row of tables lined up along it.

  “I’m going to be cooped up in a little room for a while, aren’t I?” she says. “Why don’t we go outside? The hotel has a nice garden. I saw it on the way to breakfast.”

  The weather is still on the cool side, but they find a bench in the sun, where it’s considerably warmer. The garden—or the Cypress Garden, as it’s officially named—is in a courtyard between two of the complex’s several two-story buildings. As its name implies, it’s sprinkled with slim, perfectly straight Cypress trees. Manicured gravel paths run among native grasses, plants, and flowers.

  Carolyn starts the conversation by saying what she says to just about every client: “I’m your attorney, Beth. And you should know that anything you say to me is guarded by the attorney-client privilege.”

  Then she gets specific about what she wants:

  “I need you to speak frankly with me about your relationship with your husband and Richie Forman so I can help you. And then I need you to go through your day yesterday, hour by hour. You cannot lie to me. That’s Rule Number One. I don’t want to get blindsided and I don’t want you to get blindsided.”

  Beth smiles. “So you don’t believe me either?”

  “I’m going to believe whatever you tell me, Beth. And based on what you say and the facts we have before us, I’m going to do everything within my power to attain the best outcome possible.”

  “Are you still dating that doctor? Cogan his name was, right? I saw you two together at the club a few times.”

  Carolyn’s a little taken aback by the question. “No,” she says. “We broke it off about six months ago.”

  “May I ask why?”

  “Why?” Ca
rolyn smiles. “I guess that would depend who you ask.”

  “I’m asking you.”

  She hesitates to answer, reluctant to dive into the private details of her love life with a client. But then she thinks that maybe if she’s more open, Beth will relax.

  “Simple,” she says. “I wanted to have a kid and he didn’t.”

  “You wanted to get married?”

  “No, I didn’t care so much about the married part. I’m just at the point where if I’m going to have a kid, I need to have it already.”

  “I’ve heard that one before. I’m sorry it didn’t work out.”

  “I am, too.”

  Carolyn is hoping the inquiry will end there, but Beth isn’t through. “So what’s his story? Why would he say you split up?”

  “Him? He’d probably give the same reason. At least that would be his official response. But get a few drinks into him and I bet he’d say I was psycho, exceedingly jealous, and prone to irrational outbursts.”

  “But you don’t seem that way at all. You seem very even-keeled.”

  “Mostly. Which is why you probably wouldn’t believe Ted. But objectively speaking, he’s right.”

  Beth’s eyes turn to a group of small birds that have landed nearby and are pecking about, searching for food while glancing over at them, hoping for a handout. “So, two truths,” she remarks. “Or should I say perspectives? Sometimes it’s hard to know who to believe.”

  “With Richie, I was just doing my job. You understand that?”

  Beth looks up at her. “That’s a bit of a non sequitur, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. But I wanted to say it. I’ve wanted to say it to you for a long time.”

  “I wasn’t asking for an apology.”

  “And I wasn’t giving it.” She lets her client chew on that for a second. Then she says, “Look, I don’t mind discussing my personal life. But right now I need you to tell me what happened.”

  “Where do you want me to start?”

  “Let’s start with your relationship with Mark. Where were you guys at?”

  Beth gives a little shrug. “Things, you know, just didn’t turn out exactly as I thought they would. As I said, the Mark I married was a different guy from the guy I ended up with. It wasn’t a whirlwind romance. He got under my skin, gradually. My feelings evolved. He made me feel good about living again. There I was, dealing with Richie, who was angry all the time, talking about how he’d been screwed over. I could understand it. But it just got oppressive, you know? And then after the incident—he wouldn’t talk about it, but I assume he was raped—he just became very sullen.”

  She pauses, takes a breath, and exhales hard, a sadness coming into her eyes.

  “I didn’t think he’d ever be the same again, which I could live with, but the problem was, he didn’t think he could ever be the same again. He was a different person and part of him despised the person he’d become. He’d lost this sort of wonderful innocence he had; he’d been uncorrupted. There was something really pure about him. Sure, a lot of the marketing stuff has a snake-oil side to it, but he was such an optimistic guy. And he was good at taking people’s cluttered ideas and turning them into a focused, sellable message. And there was something pure about that, even noble. There’s a lot of great technology and great ideas out there that never make it because someone couldn’t figure out how to frame it the right way. So much of the stuff is pretty incomprehensible to begin with and then you throw in some poor naming and it’s no wonder it goes nowhere.”

  “And then he got those extra years tacked on to his sentence,” Carolyn says. “For what he did to that guy.”

  “Yeah, he waited. I don’t know, it was maybe three, four weeks after he got attacked. He was patient, which is like Richie. The next time the main instigator—I guess that’s what you’d call him—the next time the guy came after him, he hit him in the neck with a homemade blade of some sort. He was pretty messed up. I think he almost died. Thank God he didn’t.”

  “Did Richie regret doing it afterwards?”

  “I don’t think so. He made it seem like he didn’t have a choice. He wasn’t totally stupid about it. He tried to make it look like a fight. Said it was self-defense. I think he’d gotten to the point where he just wanted to lash out at someone. And there was some satisfaction in it.”

  “Even if it meant losing you.”

  “I think he already felt he’d lost me. He could see that part of me had just had enough. You gotta remember, I’d already lived with all this for over two years.”

  “So then you end up with Mark. And he ends up changing on you, too?”

  “Well, in his case, I don’t know if he really changed.”

  “You said he was a different guy from the one you married.”

  “Yeah, I guess I did say that.”

  “Well, this is important, Beth. You have to be very precise in your statements. And you have to stick to what you say. So let’s try to clarify this before you get in there. Did he change or not?”

  “I think it just turned out that he was more in love with the idea of me than actually loving me. I think he thought having me as his wife would impress everyone, from his cronies here in the Valley to his father.”

  “Who’s his father?”

  “Some wealthy guy from St. Louis who ran a medical supply business. Made products for hospitals and doctors. He sold it before I met Mark.”

  “He’s still alive?”

  “Yeah, but I’ve never met him.”

  “Not even at the wedding?”

  “We had a really small wedding. At a friend’s house in Napa. We basically eloped. Mark grew up more with his mother, who died back in 2003. His father had kids with three different wives. Mark grew up in Cleveland with number two. He mostly lived with his mother, but he spent a lot of vacations with his father. He’d see him four or five times a year for a week or two at a time. He was always frustrated that his father didn’t understand what he did. He didn’t get all this web stuff. He was a manufacturing guy. Real, physical products. He didn’t get bits and bytes.”

  “Mark didn’t want kids?”

  “He said he did. But it wasn’t like he was in any hurry and when we got married, neither was I. I was thirty-two. I felt I had a couple of years to make that decision.”

  “And then what happened?”

  “He didn’t behave very well. That’s what happened.”

  “How so?”

  “Well, I’d say there were some substance-abuse issues.”

  “Like what?”

  “Pot, alcohol, some prescription drugs, a line or two of coke. He dabbled. Didn’t seem to play favorites.”

  “And he’d do this in front of you?”

  “We did it together sometimes. And let’s be clear, there was something casual about it. Every once in a while, he’d go pretty hard, but he wasn’t a heavy-duty partier or anything. He was too worried about his reputation.”

  “So what’d you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything. Which probably made things worse. I just got very passive aggressive. He was out a lot at these networking things, trying to create buzz for his new business. The Silicon Valley Circle Jerk Association, I like to call it. The CJA. A lot of nights I curled up in bed with my own glass of wine. And then he kind of had a mini nervous breakdown.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “At work one day he started to get dizzy, got some tingling in his arm, shortness of breath, and chest pains. He thought he was having a heart attack. Don Gattner, his right-hand guy, drove him over to the Parkview Hospital emergency room. Turned out it was just a bad case of acid reflux.”

  Okay, Carolyn thinks, she’s repeating what she said last night, which is good. She watches Beth as she speaks. She’s one of those women who just don’t have a bad side to their face, which looks a little longer and thinner with her hair short. Her nose is finely shaped, not too big or small, and she has greenish blue eyes and a clear complexion. She’s barely wearing any m
akeup, just some eyeliner. The only thing that strikes Carolyn as odd is why Beth changed her hair. She looks a little edgier, more artsy with the cropped blond hair, sort of like a younger version of Sharon Stone.

  “Did you dye your hair because he wanted a blonde?” she asks.

  “Actually, no. He didn’t want me to change my hair or appearance at all. He loved how natural I looked and how people thought I was such a natural beauty and all that.”

  “So why’d you do it?”

  “I just felt like it. I knew it would piss him off.”

  “And did it?”

  “Like I said, he would go around saying, you want a divorce, don’t you? And I would say no.”

  “But you did?”

  “Well, I made a mistake. One day I keyed ‘adultery divorce California’ into Google. He must have looked through my search history because he asked why I’d Googled it. But he thought it was because I’d cheated on him and wanted to know the fiduciary consequences in case I got caught. You know, if he accused me of adultery, what could that mean? So he assumed I was cheating. But I actually thought he was cheating.”

  “California’s a no-fault state so it doesn’t really mean anything,” Carolyn says. “You can allege adultery but it usually doesn’t do that much for you except ring up a big legal fee.”

  “I know. But he could never get over that. Three words typed into Google and the guy never trusts me again.”

  “No marriage is destroyed just by that.”

  “Well, it felt that way.”

  “What made you think he was cheating? Did you stop having sex?”

  “Normal sex.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “It means that he only seemed to want to have sex when I didn’t, which quickly became most of the time. In a weird way it turned him on that I didn’t want to. He could just sense it. And he’d start kissing me and I’d say, not now, I don’t feel like it. And he’d say, ‘Why, because you’re fucking around? Is that why?’ And I’d say no. And then, you know, he’d assert himself on me.”