One Hot Mess

by Lois Greiman

  “Incident?” he said.

  I caught his gaze and squeezed it tight. Despite what I knew of this man, I liked him. I couldn’t help myself, and I didn’t want to lose any gram of respect I may have gained during the last few months of therapy. “The rape,” I corrected.

  He stared at me, then dropped onto the couch and closed his eyes. “She never told nobody. Kept it to herself. Kept it…” He turned toward me. Eyes burning with emotions I didn’t even really want to understand. “She’s dead.”

  It took a moment for his words to sink in. Longer still to figure out how to respond. “Oh, Micky. I’m so sorry.”

  “Died of an overdose.”

  “Did you speak to Jamel?”

  A muscle jumped in his jaw. “For a minute.”

  I nodded, urging him on.

  “He’s …” He drew a deep breath, searching for words or thoughts or strength. I wasn’t sure which. “He’s been with Lavonn off and on for four years.”

  I wanted to apologize again, but he cut me off.

  “She got two kids of her own. Still in diapers.”

  I wanted to tell him everything was all right. Jamel would be fine. Children were resilient. They made do. They soldiered on. But maybe he wouldn’t be, sometimes people weren’t, and quite often they didn’t. I had to remind myself that I had no idea how his son would turn out, and even if I did, it wasn’t necessarily my job to appease his guilt. Sometimes pain’s a catalyst. Sometimes it’s just pain. On a good day, with a nice waxing moon and a dynamite scrying glass, I might be able to divine the difference.

  “Did he seem healthy?” I asked to fill time. “Well adjusted? Was he—”

  “She got a boyfriend,” he said, and wiped his palms down the lean length of his thighs.

  I braced myself. I knew enough of his childhood to guess where this was going. “And …”

  “He’s an ass,” he said, and jerked back to his feet.

  I drew a careful breath, watched him pace, and realized I missed Mr. Pearl. Mr. Pearl’s most pressing problem was that he got fidgety when his potatoes breached the boundaries of his brussels sprouts. I suggested in our first session together that he buy some of those clever, picnic-type plates that are divided into sections. He’d dubbed me a genius among therapists and has come back every Tuesday since.

  Micky’s problems were a little trickier. So far there had been no talk of my astounding cleverness, but I nodded like a ruminating shaman, still hoping we’d get around to that conversation. “Perhaps you should consider that your past might be coloring your perception. Sometimes it is difficult for a person with your history to—” I began, but he turned on me, eyes afire, lips snarling.

  “The boyfriends an ass!” he said.

  “Okay.” I nodded, dropped the certified shrink talk, and settled back. “What makes him an ass?”

  “How the fuck would I know? Some people are just—” He stopped himself, expression appalled, and sat, covering his face with his hands. “Shit! I’m an ass.”

  “Sometimes,” I said, and didn’t let myself smile.

  But his mercurial moods weren’t so stern. Dropping his hands, he sat up straight. His lighthouse grin peeked at me and was gone. “You’re gonna be a hell of a mom, Doc.”

  I considered that in shuddering silence for a moment and moved on. “What are you going to do now?”

  He rested his head back against the top of my couch and drew a noisy breath. “The kid’s my responsibility.”

  “Partly, anyway.”

  “Partly!” He was angry again, quick as lightning. “You’re thinking she had a choice in the matter?”

  “Didn’t she?” My voice was the epitome of the calm before the storm. Him being the storm. Me being… I don’t know. Maybe stupid?

  “You better check your notes, Doc. Could be you forgot that I raped her?”

  “Sometimes absorbing all the blame is as detrimental as accepting too little,” I said.

  “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  I felt like shrinking under my seat cushion at his tone. But being intimidated has never done me a hell of a lot of good. Spitting into the glaring eye of authority hasn’t been so hunky-dory either, but that’s another story “If you take all the blame, others won’t get their fair share.”

  He stared at me a second, then, “Fuck that,” he said.

  I nodded, reminding myself to save the crappy shrink talk for lawyers, the board of psychology, and ugly dogs that peed on my shoes. “Okay, maybe she didn’t have options about getting pregnant. But—”

  “Maybe!”

  “The child might not be yours. And even if he is, what then? She made her own choices after that. The drugs. The abandonment.”

  “You think it’s easy?” he asked. His tone was deadly calm. “You think we don’t have enough problems without our damn kids raising kids?”

  “Is this the part where you tell me how hard it is to be black?”

  It took him a moment, but finally I caught a glimpse of chagrin in his expression. “I think I pay you enough to bitch a little.”

  “If that’s how you want to spend your time.”

  He sighed, pragmatism overcoming dramatics. “You think she should have gotten rid of it?”

  Holy crap, I couldn’t even decide what to do with my plant cuttings. God forbid I be put in charge of procreation of the species. “That’s not for me to decide. You know that. And even if it were, it’s a moot point now.”

  “She was just a kid.”

  “And now he is,” I said. “Move on, Micky.”

  He glared at me, eyes angry, but I stopped him before he could blast me with his burning ghetto logic.

  “Or… you can wallow in self-pity. That’s a constructive option, too.”

  He paused for a moment, watching me. “Are you being facetious?” he asked finally. He sounded truly affronted. “Am I paying you a shitload of money for your sarcasm?”

  “Sorry,” I said, and meant it. I needed his shitload of money to pay my shitty bills.

  He glanced toward the window and swore. His posture softened a little. “What should I do?”

  I tried to force myself to relax. Turns out I’m incapable. “What are your choices?”

  He shook his head. “I could pay child support.”

  “Without legally claiming him as your son?”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged, knowing he’d realize the answer in a minute. “It might assuage your guilt,” I said.

  He lowered his brows, thinking things over, then: “You think the boy wouldn’t get it.”

  I said nothing. Generally it’s my most effective method of psychoanalyzing.

  “That fucking boyfriend,” he said, and suddenly he was pacing again, striding across the room in frustration. “Fuckin’ corn-fed fat-ass. Cocky as hell.” He stopped, turned toward me. “Maybe I could start a savings account.”

  I watched him. “Micky, you don’t even know if you’re his father.”

  Seconds ticked away. “Does it matter?”

  “Maybe not. If you don’t think it does.”

  “If I’m not, it ain’t through no fault of mine.”

  “So you’re going to make yourself pay, even if he’s someone else’s child.”

  Tension cranked up tight, then: “You’re right,” he said. “Throwing money at him would be a stupid-ass thing to do.”

  I hadn’t meant that exactly, but I let him talk things through.

  “Stupid, shortsighted, self-centered.” He nodded in concert to his thoughts.

  I gave him encouraging silence.

  “Thing to do is get custody,” he said, and I managed to refrain from gasping.

  he phone beside my bed rang at one of those small hours of the morning ear-tagged by God Himself for sleeping. I picked up the receiver on something like the eighty-second ring.

  “Babekins!”

  I winced at the nasally voice. Brainy Laney had returned to the hinterlands of Idaho for
filming yesterday and wouldn’t be back until Christmas Eve. I resented the fact that she was gone even more than I hated the idea that the Geekster remained. The fact that she’d left a message on my answering machine saying her Saudi friend was going to check up on Ramla’s sister only made the situation slightly more palatable.

  “What time is it?” I asked.

  “You know I can’t sleep when Angel’s gone.” He sounded as chirpy as a midnight cricket, and slightly more irritating.

  “I can,” I said, and blinked blurrily at the alarm. “Is it three o’clock?”

  “Could be.”

  “Three o’clock in the morning!”

  “Probably. Say, listen. Remember how I said I’d look into weird deaths?”

  I narrowed my eyes, mind kicking miserably into a slow semblance of life. “Yeah?”

  “Turns out there are a buttload of ‘em. You know a gal was killed by an elephant in Tennessee last year? Course, you can’t really blame the pachyderm. I mean, they’d named her Winkie. And who the hell…sorry …heck would—”

  “I’m not too tired to drive over and kick your ass,” I said. Sometimes I’m a little crabby when people wake me at three in the morning. Sometimes I’m equally crabby at four in the afternoon, but I don’t have such a convenient excuse.

  Solberg chuckled as if I were joking. Since the advent of Elaine in his life, there wasn’t much that could get him down. Maybe I resented that most of all.

  “Okay. Okay. Anyway, there’s a ton of freaky shit… sorry…stuff happening. Someone should write a book. Hey, you want to—”

  “Solberg…” I warned.

  “All right. Keep your pants on. Here it is: Guy died while scuba diving off the shore of Kauai.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Amos Bunting.”

  I yawned. “I’ve never heard of—”

  “But he went by the name of Steve.”

  “Steve … Steve Bunting!” My mind kicked out of neutral with a painful lurch. “Holy crap!” I was suddenly wide awake. “He was a coordinator for one of the senator’s campaigns. I saw a picture of him.”

  “Yeah, well, he’s dead now. Ran out of oxygen—”

  “When?”

  “What?”

  I was scrambling out of bed toward my office. “When did it happen?”

  “Just last month. I guess Hawaii’s good for diving even—”

  I hauled him up short. “What day of the week?”

  “What?”

  “Just tell me, damn it!”

  “Thursday,” he said, and I wrote it in bloodred permanent marker on my tagboard.

  26

  Maybe money can’t buy happiness. But it can get you a nice little villa in Tuscany, and that’s close enough for me.

  —Dagwood Dean Daly,

  professional gangster

  WOKE EARLY on Tuesday morning. Someone would die on Friday! I knew it! Well, I knew that someone would die on a Friday. Or had already died. Somewhere in the world. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn’t take a Ph.D. for most folks to figure that out.

  After discovering Buntings demise, Solberg had scoured the Internet for other deaths related to the senator and had come up with bupkis. Knowing the Geekster’s world-renowned techno abilities, I had to believe there was, then, bupkis to be found.

  Shelving that information, I ran up Vine Avenue with my trusty canine at my side. Or, more precisely, I chugged along like a panting orangutan with Harlequin dragging me all the way. Running sometimes clears my head. This time it only lubricated it. The temperature had climbed to eighty-three degrees by eight a.m. Maybe somewhere near Santas workshop, global warming is welcomed like the second coming, but L.A. is one of those cities destined to be set adrift by the melting (and therefore pissed-off) glaciers, and I gotta tell you, most of us on the West Coast aren’t all that thrilled with the idea. Sweat was dripping into my eyes like Chinese water torture by the time I reached my front gate.

  “The bath, it is empty.”

  I wiped the sweat off my face with a wilty sleeve and focused on Ramla Al-Sadr. She was standing in the middle of the sidewalk, dressed in enough clothes to ensure modesty and heat exhaustion.

  “Would you like to use?”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m afraid I haven’t learned anything useful about your sister yet.”

  “That is to be expected,” she said, expression troubled yet stoic. “These things they take the time.” She wrinkled her nose. “But you cannot forgo the bath until she is here.”

  By the time I was drying my hair, Ramla was nowhere to be seen. I slunk across my yard and into my own house before I had to face her and my failure again.

  Finally, late and despondent, I headed off to work.

  My life felt disjointed. I saw five clients, then swilled down a burger at an In-N-Out on the way home and ended the day in my home office. After scribbling down all the information I could find regarding the four victims, I stared dismally at my wall, but there wasn’t much there. I had the least amount of info on Bunting. According to what the senator had told me, he had never married. In fact, he’d lived with his parents off and on for most of his life. But Solberg had learned that since their deaths eighteen months earlier, he’d resided in Europe.

  The next couple of days were filled with quiet frustration and overt craziness. Still, there was no good explanation for the ensuing phone call, other than the fact that my wall was covered with the flotsam of unresolved deaths. Well, maybe my dark mood had some effect, too. True, I’d been on more dates in the past week than even my rich fantasy life usually offered, but I felt a sort of off-center loneliness. Ramla’s stoic sorrow gnawed at me, while my sense of not belonging seemed magnified by the looming holidays. I’d sent off gifts to Christianna and the others, but the gesture felt empty. All the same, there was no supportable reason for my current lapse in sanity.

  “Rivera.” I clutched the receiver in white-knuckled fingers. I was trying for convivial and coolheaded. Instead, I may have sounded breathy and a little high. I’d experimented with a half dozen other salutations in my mirror earlier in the day, but “Hello, darling” seemed a little Zsa Zsa and “Yo” sounded kind of ghetto coming from a woman whose skin tone was a shade lighter than skim milk. “Do you have a minute?” I asked.

  There was a brief delay, during which I imagined the lieutenant narrowing his eyes, bitter-sharp mind churning. “Slow night for you, McMullen?” he asked.

  It was after eleven o’clock. I’d spent the past seven hours trying to talk myself out of calling him. If I’d had my druthers I would have been asleep for a gerbil’s lifetime by then, but the previous night had been a doozy Usually the dead and the nocturnal me have a good deal in common. But it was the dead who had kept me awake.

  In fact, it was Kathy Baltimore herself who consistently reappeared in my dreams. She asked me what day it was. I told her it was Friday. At which time she began singing hymns, but she had no mouth, and only one arm.

  Creepy as hell. It’s times like those that make a girl kind of wish she had someone to talk to in the wee hours of the morning. Someone sans tail and collar.

  “No sleepovers?” Rivera asked. His voice rumbled through my sleep-hungry system like dark rum, but I fought the effects. There were other fish in the sea. Who cared that none of them resonated in my humming place? They didn’t try to bait me with every spoken word, either. Which was exactly what he was trying to do. Still, I kept my tone as sunny as a kindergartner’s. “Just me and Harley and a carton of yogurt,” I said.

  “Didn’t like the way Curly Top looked when he got down to his skivvies?”

  I could only assume that Curly Top was Donald Archer, but I smiled at his poor attempt to rile me. “Not everyone can be a fifteen-year-old supermodel,” I said.

  “Isn’t that the shits.” I could hear him easing into a chair and imagined him leaning back, probably smugly postcoital. The idea made my guts knot up like pretzels. Still, I shouldn’t have mentio
ned his latest conquest. I chided myself silently, remembering belatedly that I didn’t need him. Didn’t care who he coitaled. Nevertheless, I spoke again.

  “Is she there now?” I asked. “Or is it past her bedtime?”

  He chuckled. I gritted my teeth, closed my eyes to my own snowballing stupidity, and tried a more mature tack.

  “Listen, Rivera, I didn’t call to start a pissing contest.”

  “Wouldn’t do you any good, anyway.” He sighed, proud. “I have a bigger dick.”

  “You are a bigger—” I began, then yanked myself up short, took a deep breath, tried again. “I was hoping to speak to you.” I closed my eyes. My hands were shaking. Stupid. So stupid. “Possibly without spewing acrimony?”

  “About?”

  I had been considering how best to phrase this for hours and had come up with some elegant phraseology. I took a deep, quiet breath and tried my knockout punch. “I’ve given the situation due deliberation.” I paused, maybe for effect, maybe to round up any remaining brain cells that might still have a flicker of life. Rivera tends to scramble my mind like an eggbeater. “And I believe someone intends to kill your father.”

  There was a moment of absolute silence.

  And then he laughed.

  I gripped the receiver with Amazonian bonhomie and waited for his fun-loving jocularity to subside. “Tell me the truth,” he said finally. “Is it me?”

  My hands had quit shaking and the ghoulish images of the past few nights receded. Anger, it seems, is something of a panacea for me. “I’m certainly thrilled to entertain you,” I said. “But this is not amusing.”

  “Lots of things aren’t.” His chair creaked. I heard him stand, listened to his footfalls bluster across the floor, and wondered if he wasn’t, perhaps, quite as postcoitally content as he had first seemed.

  I drew a deep breath and took the plunge. “I need you to take a look at something.”

  The pacing stopped with abrupt finality. “It’s been a hell of a day, McMullen.” His tone had gone from dark rum to fermented grog. “If it’s not you in a black negligee, I’m not interested.”

  My lungs considered exploding. My heart surged a little and my scalp tingled dangerously From his drawer beside my bed, Frangois growled an affronted-Frenchman challenge, but I kept my tone watermelon cool. “I don’t own a black negligee.”