The Big Exit

by David Carnoy

  “Yes, Bender. Tom Bender. And he asked for an ambulance for his dog.”

  Carlyle looks at Madden, then turns his head to speak into the microphone again.

  “Did you say dog?”

  “Roger that. D-O-G dog.”

  29/ PROTECTING YOUR SOURCES

  RICHIE DOESN’T TELL BENDER WHERE HE’S GOING, HE JUST SAYS HE wants to get out for a bit and clear his head and would he mind lending him the mountain bike he saw in his garage for a quick ride?

  Bender isn’t keen on the idea. Immersed in dashing off a quick two-thousand-word rant on his site, he tells him to hang tight, he’s almost done. The contract, he notes, only stipulates for eight hours of sleep and one hour of “independent recreation,” and the trip to Equinox qualified as independent recreation in his book; after all, he’d been permitted to roam the gym freely, had he not?

  Everything with Bender is a goddamn negotiation, and in the end, he only relents after Richie offers to amend the contract by hand and extend his stay by an hour.

  “You don’t come back, there will be serious repercussions,” Bender warns.

  By the time he gets to the track it’s fully dark outside and the lights are on. The facility isn’t loaded with people but there’s a half dozen or so runners, some going about their business more seriously than others. He knows she probably won’t be there yet—he’s fifteen minutes early—but he does a quick search before walking the bike over to the infield and setting it down in a spot near the middle where he can keep an eye on it while he runs.

  He hasn’t been to Angell Field in more than eight years. Earlier in the day, as he and Bender drove past the Stanford campus, he had a flashback of running there with Beth. They’d gone there occasionally at night and he always remembered the place fondly, maybe because she always looked so good in her running tights and Nike running hat.

  When he called her in her room at the hotel (Ashley, with a little finessing of a hotel employee and perhaps even a small bribe, had discovered she was staying there under her neighbor’s name), he hadn’t expected her to pick up. When she did—and then agreed to meet him—he quickly had to come up with a rendezvous point. Angell Field it was.

  He stretches his calves, then heads out onto the track, gradually ratcheting up his pace. He’s on lap six, the 1.5-mile mark, when he spots her. She’s standing by the oval near the entrance wearing a loose-fitting dark gray sweat suit, her head covered by the top’s hood. As he goes past, he slows but doesn’t stop.

  “Come on,” he says. “Run with me.”

  He keeps up the slow pace until she’s beside him, then picks it up a little.

  “Not too fast,” she says. “I haven’t been running.”

  “Anybody follow you?”

  “I don’t think so. You?”

  “I’ve got a tracer bracelet on my ankle,” he says. “They know where I am all the time. Every once in a while I get buzzed by a squad car but I don’t think I’ve got an official tail.”

  A short pause, then: “I’m sorry about the Marriott,” she says.

  He’d told her on the phone that not surprisingly he’d lost the gig at the Marriott. The manager said that “regrettably” he was going to have to “hold off” using him for now. Now that he was dealing with an accused killer, the bastard had gone from being Mr. Gruff to Mr. Polite.

  “I told him that with my newfound notoriety I could really pack them in and that he was a fool for not booking me, someone else would.”

  “Someone will,” she says.

  “This guy Bender wants to do a concert around here somewhere to raise money for my legal defense. But he’s fucking crazy.”

  They run in silence for about a hundred yards and then he says: “You know what I came here to ask you.”

  “I didn’t set you up, Richie.”

  She’d always had the eerie ability to know what he was going to say before he said it, and he’d never minded it, even found it endearing. But this time her quick response grates.

  “You sure about that? Last I checked, you were the one who said you wanted him dead, didn’t you?”

  She pulls up suddenly and puts her hands on her hips, her jaw clenched. He stops, too, and when he does, she lunges toward him and grabs him, pulling him toward her with her left hand. He then feels her other hand slip underneath his sweatshirt and she begins to grope him. But that’s not really what she’s doing. She’s fucking patting him down.

  “Are you wearing a wire?” she says in a low voice, a little wild-eyed. “Are you wearing a fucking wire? Is that what you’re doing?”

  He tears away from her and pulls off his sweatshirt, then his T-shirt, until he’s standing there bare-chested on the edge of the infield grass, giving her his best Marky Mark.

  “You want the pants off, too,” he says. “Oh wait, you already did a dick-check the other day at Watercourse Way.”

  He doesn’t get the feisty reaction he expects. Instead, she just stares at him the same way she did back in the private hot-tub room when he’d stripped down. Part of her still can’t get over his chiseled new body. He was in decent shape before he went away, but now he truly does look like he could be on a billboard in an underwear ad.

  When she realizes she’s staring, she looks down, embarrassed. “Put your shirt back on,” she says. “It’s cold.” And then she jogs away.

  It doesn’t take long to catch up to her.

  “So you’re saying Watercourse Way was a spontaneous act? It wasn’t planned?”

  “I didn’t say I wanted him dead. I didn’t.”

  She’s still stuck on that.

  “Well, what? What was the exact quote, ‘I sometimes wish he was dead. I wish he’d just go away.’ Want, wish, what’s the difference? It’s fucking semantics.”

  “I wish I could run a little faster. Do I want to? Not really. There’s a difference. And you took what I said out of context anyway.”

  He laughs. “Context? You’d just fucked my brains out and you’re lying there naked on a towel, all fucking splayed out, casually sharing your inner thoughts like you’re talking to your shrink or something. Context?”

  The image is indelible. More than the sex, more than the sensation of tasting her mouth again, that image of her lying there had remained with him. He couldn’t get it out of his head, the way she kept pulling her wet hair back as she spoke, her eyes staring up at the ceiling. She looked completely relaxed and yet possessed at the same time.

  “Just leave,” he’d said. “File for divorce.”

  She let out a laugh. “He’ll kill me before that happens,” she said. “His precious money. His precious fucking company. He can’t stand the idea of giving any of it up.”

  “I told you, go to the police. You have to.”

  “He’s smarter than that. You don’t know how smart he is. You always underestimated him.”

  She was right about that.

  “I didn’t come here to fight, Richie,” she says now. “I shouldn’t have let Watercourse Way happen. I shouldn’t have brought you into my shit.”

  “But you did, Beth. And it wasn’t an accident. So don’t get all hindsight on me.”

  She falls silent. Several strides later she says, “You know what the funny thing was? Things were okay when you were in prison. Out of sight, out of mind, right? But it all started to deteriorate a few months before you got out. It weighed on him, you getting out. I could see it. And then I wanted to know again. Sometimes I said to myself it was for you but it was really for me.”

  Now he’s the one who pulls up. “Know what?”

  She stops, too, and stands there, hands on hips, trying to catch her breath. “I told you not to go so fast,” she says.

  “Know what, Beth?”

  “Whether he really switched places on you. I believed you, Richie, I really did. But part of me wanted to hear it from him. It became sort of an obsession.”

  She says that was what some of the drinking and drugs were about. She figured she’d loosen h
im up and get him to talk about it. She’d ask in different ways, approach it from different angles, and every time he’d say he wasn’t behind the wheel. He told the same story every time.

  Then one morning when things were at one of their low points, they were sitting in the kitchen, each having their coffee, reading the newspaper, when he turned to her and said, “I love you, Beth, and if it makes you feel any better, I was driving.”

  For a second, she thought she’d imagined it. She was pretty hung-over and her head was a little foggy. Did he just say what I think he said? Here, she’d tried to ply him with all these substances, she’d even looked into how she might administer one of the so-called truth serums, sodium pentothal or some other barbiturate, and now, totally sober, he’d offhandedly confessed, wedging it between a couple of layers of conflicted emotions. As far as sandwiches go, it didn’t taste good, and her first response, ironically, was not to believe him.

  “Yeah, I did it,” he said. “But not for the reasons you think I did.”

  And then he got up from the table and left.

  “He wouldn’t talk about it after that,” she tells Richie now. “It was as if he hadn’t said it. But he basically replaced one uncertainty with another. It was sick. It was as if he knew I was giving up, that I was losing my curiosity and would ditch him if it disappeared.”

  The revelation leaves Richie not so much stunned as steamed—and in the cool night air, now that he’s stopped running, there’s literally steam rising from his body. He should have known that the vindication he’s sought all these years would arrive with such a resounding and dissatisfying whimper. Fucking great, he thinks. Just fan-fucking-tastic.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this the other day?” he asks.

  “You were already so disappointed with me. It was hard to have someone who used to love me so much have so much disdain for me.”

  “Is that why you had sex with me?”

  The question seems to provoke her—and refocus her. “You want the truth?”

  “Yeah. Give me your best Jack. I can handle it.”

  “I just wanted to,” she says.

  “That’s it. I just wanted to.”

  “Hold on, I’m not finished. I wanted to and I didn’t give a shit if Mark found out.”

  “So, you did set me up.”

  “No. Not in the way you’re thinking. I was just being reckless.”

  Her lip starts to tremble. “I’m so sorry,” she says. The tears come after that; she’s full-on crying. He moves closer to her, gently pulling her toward him. She rests her head on his shoulder and sobs quietly. He looks around, checking to see who’s watching. A runner looks at them as he passes by and Richie raises a hand behind Beth’s back, flashing a hi-everything’s-all-right-nothing-to-see-here signal.

  “My lawyer says they could arrest me,” she says after a moment, separating from him and wiping her eyes.

  He shakes his head. “I can’t believe you hired her. Of all the fucking people. Did you have to? Carolyn Dupuy?”

  “I like her. She’s tough. She got under your skin, not mine.”

  He looks at her incredulously, wants to call foul, low blow.

  “Well, she’s right,” he says spitefully. “They probably will arrest you. They just need to get a few more ducks lined up.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  He readies the big gun, the one he’s been holding back.

  “They check phone records, Beth,” he says. “They know you texted me right before Mark was killed. They’re probably just trying to get a little more evidence.”

  “I didn’t text you.”

  He looks at her, his eyes narrowing, trying to read hers.

  “Really? You sure about that?”

  “I replied to yours, yeah. You asked me if everything was okay, and I wrote, ‘y.’ One letter. That’s it. That was my big text. I sent it when I got out of yoga. I thought your message was sweet but a little dangerous.”

  “You didn’t write anything about Mark knowing about us and that he was coming home and that you were worried?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t give me your address?”

  “My address? Why would I do that?”

  Shit, he thinks, suddenly nauseated.

  “Richie?”

  “What?”

  “You were there, weren’t you?”

  He studies her eyes again, hoping they show some glimmer of deceit.

  “You didn’t send it,” he says, but this time it’s not a question but an admission.

  “What happened, Richie?”

  He runs a hand nervously through his hair, his mind racing. If it’s true, if she really didn’t send the message, it means someone else did. And it means someone else set him up. But who? And wouldn’t she see the messages he’d sent back? Someone would physically have to get on her phone, tap out the messages, and delete the thread. The other possibility was that it was done remotely via the spyware she claimed was on the phone. He just didn’t know what to believe at this point.

  “Tell me what me happened, Richie,” he hears her say. He looks up at her. It sounds a little too much like a prompt, so now it’s his turn to get paranoid. Moving closer to her, he slips his hand under her sweatshirt. “Do you mind?” he asks.

  “I’m not taking off my shirt so you better go under that, too,” she says.

  “Thanks.”

  He slides his hand up her shirt and she flinches a little when he strafes her stomach. “Cold hands,” she says. He apologizes with a shrug.

  “Yeah,” he says after moment, “I was there.”

  He tells her that after they split up after Watercourse Way, he biked over to University Avenue and locked his bike up and walked around. He hadn’t been there in a while and wanted to see how much it had changed, chill for a bit, and fill his water bottle and pump his tires up before doing a much curtailed version of a ride he used to do over the hill to San Gregorio Beach through La Honda. He was in the Palo Alto Bicycles shop a little after four when he got her first message.

  It said: “Mark knows. On his way home. Scared. Can you come?”

  He wrote back: “Where are you?”

  A few minutes later she gave him the address, followed by, “Please come now.”

  He shot her back another text, trying to get more details, but she never wrote back. He didn’t go at first. In fact, he contemplated calling the police and dumping it on them. But he couldn’t find a pay phone and didn’t want to call from his own phone, figuring it might get him into trouble. And he didn’t know exactly what to say. So he rode over. It was a detour on his planned ride but not that far out of the way.

  It didn’t take him long to get there. Maybe ten, twelve minutes. And when he got there it didn’t seem like anybody was home. There were no cars in the driveway and he couldn’t see the garage from the gate. He gave the buzzer a quick push and no one answered. He wasn’t sure what the hell to do. The place was silent. Everything seemed very peaceful. He started to get a bad vibe about the whole thing, so he wiped down the buzzer where he’d touched it, and got on his bike and rode out of there. He turned off his phone, too. He didn’t want to get any more messages from her.

  He only turned it back on when he got to the train station. That’s when he texted her, asking if she was all right. When he got the “y” from her he felt a little relieved, but part of him didn’t think everything was fine. That’s why he wasn’t all that surprised when Ashley, his friend from work, texted him later on that evening, saying she’d seen something on Twitter about Mark being killed. He’d had a feeling of doom all night.

  “The spyware,” he says.

  “What about it?”

  “Do you know how it worked? Did Mark control it? Or these guys he had following you?”

  “I think they were monitoring it for him. But I’m sure he had access to it. I mean, he was the one who set it up. At least I assume he did.”

  “And no one had access to your phone at aro
und four o’clock? You had it in your possession the whole time?”

  “Yeah.” But after she says it, he sees some doubt creep into her eyes. “Well, come to think of it, I did let Pam make a call. She said her battery died.”

  “Pam? Your neighbor?”

  “Yeah. But it was just for like a minute. And I don’t think it was exactly at four.”

  “Was it before or after?”

  “After. Closer to four fifteen, I think.”

  “Did you see her the whole time she was making the call?”

  “Sort of. She may have turned her back a little. But why would she text you? Why would she do that? How could she be involved?”

  “Did she or her husband have anything against Mark?”

  “Against him? I mean, he’d hit on me, but I don’t think killing Mark was going to increase the odds of sleeping with me.”

  “Did you tell the wife about it?”

  “Pam? No. But I didn’t have to. He wasn’t exactly discreet about it.”

  “Well, wouldn’t Mark have noticed?”

  “He behaved around Mark.”

  “But did you say anything to Mark about it?”

  “Come on, Richie. Mark assumed every guy wanted to fuck me—whether they did or not. That doesn’t explain why she’d text you.”

  He nods. He’d told Lowenstein about the alleged spyware. Such programs existed, Lowenstein said, and were more common than people thought. But he said that it was a mistake for Richie to think that just because she said she had spyware on her phone that she actually had it. As part of the discovery process, they’d dig through all that. He’d get an independent lab to examine her phone and they’d comb through the phone records just like the detectives were doing. At this point, his job was to figure out what evidence they had against him and to work on ways to refute each piece. He would then build a story to support their case. But the evidence came first. It was the foundation. You had to weaken the foundation until the weight of the prosecution’s case collapsed onto itself. It was as simple as that.