Damage Control: A Novel

by Denise Hamilton

  We’d settled upon the Coffee Gallery in these smoky foothills because it was county territory, far away from any LAPD haunts.

  I ripped open two packets of sugar and poured them into my coffee. Then I stirred it and took a sip.

  “I’d like to get one thing straight before we start. Anabelle is my friend and Randall was your old partner. We’re on the same side.”

  Comstock said nothing.

  “I know Homicide is tracking down every lead, and I hope that they look into this show that Randall was supposedly consulting on, Rookie. But I also want you to know that last week when I met Randall—”

  “If you were old friends, how come you only met Randall last week?”

  “We were close in high school. Then we lost touch. This case brought us back together.”

  Comstock cracked his knuckles and looked bored. I could tell he didn’t believe me.

  “As I was saying, when I saw Anabelle last week, Randall mentioned he was asking around about Emily Mortimer’s murder. And that got me to thinking. Maybe he got too close to unmasking her killer?”

  “That’s an interesting theory,” said Comstock.

  “You have another? Like the drug gang hit? If there’s anything you could tell me about—”

  “I don’t have shit,” he said. “Neither did Randall. He was grasping at straws. And freaking out his wife.”

  “How so?”

  Comstock leaned his elbows on the Formica table.

  “Maybe you can tell me.”

  “I have no idea.”

  Comstock studied me as if trying to make up his mind.

  “Look, I’m doing this because it’s what Randall would have wanted. I don’t really care about Anabelle or her family or how you’ve reconnected yadda yadda. In fact, it’s a little strange that Anabelle didn’t tell her good friend that her husband was looking into links between Mortimer’s murder and other unsolved L.A. strangulation murders with female victims. ’Cause she knew. Randall said she brought him coffee one night when he was working at home and when she saw what was on his computer screen, she made a strange noise and dropped the cup.”

  Comstock paused.

  “It was the mug shot of a small-time drug dealer who’d been charged with strangling his girlfriend in the mid-1990s. The scumbag was acquitted after a long trial. His name was Stephen Dumbrowski. The vic, Heidi Magellan, was murdered in their Inglewood apartment.”

  Comstock watched my reaction.

  I shook my head. “Never heard of him or her.”

  “Randall thought Anabelle might have recognized Dumbrowski from her junkie days.”

  “So you know how she and Randall met?”

  Comstock nodded. “But it’s not common knowledge at the LAPD. They frown on things like that.”

  He looked at me and something passed between us. We’d both been entrusted with secrets. While it didn’t make us friends, it thawed the icy gulf between us.

  I said, “So did Anabelle know Dumbrowski?”

  “Randall pressed her, and finally she admitted she’d met him in her party days. She was floored to learn he’d been tried for murder. She’d apparently been out of the country when the trial went down. Randall had a hunch she knew him better than she let on.”

  “But he never got to the bottom of it?”

  Comstock shrugged.

  “If you think this is so important, why not ask Anabelle yourself?”

  He shook his head. “I’m not a detective and I’m not assigned to the case. There are protocols about these things.”

  “Have you told Homicide your suspicions?”

  He grimaced. “I’m going to. But I’d like to give the detectives something more solid than a spilled drink.”

  Comstock fired up his laptop and called up a file. He slid the screen around to me. It showed a police mug shot of a sullen young man holding a booking number.

  I felt an icy trickle down my back and swayed in my seat as the memories rose like bile. Immediately I fought to shove them back into the hellish little box that resided somewhere between my heart and my belly.

  But for once, I couldn’t. I had to go back there, to that night, and figure it out.

  And then I was sitting cross-legged on a dirty shag carpet in a bedroom in Playa del Rey. The music was pounding in the other room. A couple lay entwined on the bed and a guy named Ivan in a Wile E. Coyote shirt was mixing G&Ts with date-rape drugs that would knock us out. Then Anabelle was kissing Ivan, and a blue-eyed guy named Dan was trying to tug me to my feet and lead me from the room. And despite the roofies, despite the booze, despite the fact that I’d spent half my life repressing it, I knew exactly who the guy in the mug shot was. I ID’d him instantly.

  Comstock leaned forward. “You know this guy?”

  But I was very far away.

  “It’s fi-yunne,” Anabelle was saying. “Nothing’s gonna happen unless I want it to.”

  Oh, Anabelle! We’d been young and immortal until the illusion cracked like a shoddy ceramic doll.

  “Does he look familiar?”

  I squinted and turned toward the voice and slowly LAPD sergeant Lionel Comstock came back into focus.

  “Stephen Ivan Dumbrowski,” I read.

  I tried to furrow my brow. To look as if I was trying to place the name and the face. To search my memory. While deep inside the recessed gray matter, where no one could see, the frantic thoughts went round and round.

  Had Anabelle told Randall what had happened to her at sixteen? What relevance did it have today? And what right did I have to tell Anabelle’s story, if she’d chosen to keep silent all these years?

  Slowly, I shook my head. “Stephen Dumbrowski definitely doesn’t ring any bells.”

  This was semantically correct because the guy I’d met was Ivan.

  “Sure took you long enough,” Comstock said shrewdly.

  I gave him a long, frank stare.

  “I meet so many people in my job that after a while they tend to blur together. Even people I’ve never met begin to look familiar. And you’re asking me to go back almost twenty years.”

  Comstock’s jaw tightened. He pulled the laptop back.

  “So what happened after Randall and Anabelle mopped up the spilled coffee?” I said, eager to change the subject.

  Comstock fixed me with a moody look. “Apparently she went upstairs and looked up the Dumbrowski trial. Randall did a search history of her computer after she didn’t come home.”

  “What do you mean, she didn’t come home?”

  “Awhile later, Anabelle came downstairs in workout gear. The mug shot had stirred up old ghosts and she needed some sweat therapy. She came home after midnight. Claimed she’d parked along a cliff after going to the gym and watched the surf for a while.”

  “Where do you think she went?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me.”

  I shook my head. “She kept this all to herself.”

  “She kept a whole lot to herself. Randall checked. She never made it to the gym.”

  35

  As I got back on the freeway, my head teemed with questions. Where had Anabelle been that night? Had she gone to confront Ivan after all these years? But how would she know where to find him? And what did that have to do with her husband’s murder? Or Emily Mortimer’s?

  But most of all, why hadn’t she told me?

  I’d hoped we were drawing close again, erasing the passage of years, the estrangement. I wanted her to confide in me. As usual, I wanted to rescue her, to fix her and make it all better. Instead, I felt a familiar rush of disappointment.

  When was I going to grow up?

  * * *

  “I’m home,” I called, hanging up my jacket.

  I was disappointed that no one answered. For all that she grated on my nerves with her smoking, her neediness, and her endless bossy advice, I’d grown used to my mother’s presence. And compared to the disaster that reigned at Villa Marbella, my cottage was a haven of tranquillity.
/>   What if my attacker had returned while I was gone? I sniffed the air. Smoke. It didn’t smell like a house that had been closed and unoccupied for hours. The back windows were open. A pack of cigarettes lay on the kitchen table next to a dirty but empty ashtray. And from inside the trash can curled a spiral of . . .

  I ran to the sink, grabbed a pot from the drain board, and filled it with water. The kitchen trash had caught fire. The plastic was melting along one side of the bin as the fire spread. Flames shot from the top.

  I poured the water, then kicked over the bin as I ran for more water. Junk mail and Styrofoam cartons and cigarette butts with telltale lipstick spilled onto the tile, flames still licking the edges. I dumped another pot of water over the mess, flooding the floor, stamping on orange cinders. Then I ran for the pantry, grabbed a ten-pound bag of flour, and emptied that over everything.

  Something exploded. I shrieked, convinced my attacker had chosen this moment to return.

  “What on earth?” Mom stood at the kitchen door. The explosion had been our screen door slamming shut.

  She held a cigarette between her fingers. The smile on her face faded in alarm.

  “Maggie, child, have you lost your mind?”

  And then I did lose it.

  “The one thing I asked when I took you in, Mom, was to not smoke in my house,” I screamed at the top of my lungs, letting every ugly impulse from the past year rip loose inside me. “And not only did you disregard that, but you almost burned my house down. Thanks a fucking lot.”

  Mom hurried to the kitchen table and stubbed out her cigarette. “I’m sorry, hon, I meant to put it out before I came inside, but I—”

  “It’s not that cigarette,” I said, picking up the ashtray and hurling it against the wall. It shattered, making a satisfying noise. “It’s this one.” I prodded at the sodden, floury mess with my high-heeled shoe, “and that one. And the other. You dumped an ashtray full of cigarette butts into the trash and one of them was still going and it ignited. If I hadn’t come home when I did, who knows what could have happened? I have had it with you. You’re worse than a teenager, sneaking around and lying about your smoking.”

  Mom’s eyes darted guiltily from side to side. “I’m sorry. I was sure I’d—”

  “Well, you didn’t. You’re careless and disrespectful and ungrateful. I work like a dog to make sure we’ve got enough money to pay the bills and stay in this house, and you’re trying to burn it down.”

  I tried to stop myself, but the floodgates were wide open and there was no turning back. Even though the irony of my next words made me squirm, I still spoke them. Perhaps my fervor was directed as much at myself as at her.

  “Can’t you see that you’ve got a problem? You’re an addict. And you’re stupid, Mom. Because smoking causes cancer. And if your cancer’s back, it could kill you. And if it’s back, then it’s me who’ll have to nurse you again, and if you don’t make it, then it’s me who’ll have to scrape up the money for your funeral. You’re going to die and leave me all alone. And I hate you for that, Mom. You’re going to die. Do you understand me? You have to stop smoking. Now. Before it’s too late.”

  Mom’s face had gone from shame to anger as I spoke. Now something went soft and pained in her eyes and she hurried over and put her arms around me.

  “We’re all going to die sooner or later, Maggie,” she said, so softly that I had to strain to hear her. “That’s the one certainty that life offers us. Please don’t hate me because I smoke.”

  “But it’s going to kill you,” I said with a sob.

  “Stress and uncertainty will kill me too, and perhaps even faster. I’m sorry about what happened. I should have been more careful. Please look at me . . .”

  She waited until I lifted my eyes to hers.

  “Maggie, I give you my solemn word that I will never smoke in this house again.”

  “You’ll just break your promise again. You’ve broken every promise you ever made to me.”

  “No.” Mom’s voice was steady. “This is one you can count on. But, Maggie . . . smoking relieves my anxiety. Of course I’m worried that the cancer’s come back. It’s killing me not to know. It’s killing me to think that my body could be turning against me, that there might be these . . . cells inside me, growing, multiplying. You’re not home all day and I’m by myself and it gets lonely. And I dwell on morbid things. So I invite Earlyn over to visit. She takes my mind off things. And she smokes and one thing led to another and I started up again. I knew I shouldn’t. But please try to see things from my perspective for once.”

  My entire life, I’d been asked to see it from the perspective of others. First my parents, then my friends. And when I grew up, I’d chosen a profession where I was a perfect conduit, who existed solely to present the views of others. Our clients, who must be pleased and placated at all costs.

  “I’m sorry about the fire,” Mom said. “And I’m glad you reacted so quickly to put it out. But honestly? It probably would have burned itself out anyway before it did much harm.”

  There she went again, refusing to take responsibility for what she’d done and minimizing my concerns. Like I was the one who’d overreacted, just because she’d started a fire in my wood-frame house.

  “There now,” Mom said, running her palm along the side of my face, and I realized I was crying.

  “I’ll help you clean this up, then let’s go visit Earlyn. That’s what I came over to tell you when I saw your car in the driveway. Earlyn got a new cat. Bandit. You’re going to love him. And she bought them each a six-foot kitty condo with ledges and hideaways and dangling ropes. They’re very playful animals, you’ll see.”

  But I was in no mood to be coddled and distracted like a child.

  “No, thank you,” I said. “If you like Earlyn so much, why don’t you move in with her.”

  And I stomped out of the room.

  * * *

  In my bedroom, I changed into sweats, still bristling with self-righteousness, as I heard Mom sweeping and mopping the floor. I knew it hurt her knees to bend down, but I convinced myself that she’d caused this mess and it was her responsibility to clean it up.

  For ten minutes, I lay on my bed and brooded as brooms and mops and dustpans banged. I’d just made up my mind to apologize for my outburst and offer to take over when I heard the kitchen door slam again and my mother’s footsteps echo down the wooden stairs, headed to see Earlyn.

  I remembered the sad, haunted look in her eyes as she embraced me and was touched by guilt. Why did we fight? What if she didn’t have long to live? Shouldn’t I overlook her faults and try to cherish the time we had together? I’d catch her when she came back, later tonight, and try to make amends before she left in the morning for Catalina.

  I crept out to the pristine kitchen and got myself some hummus with crackers. Then I sat at the computer and typed in the names Stephen Ivan Dumbrowski and Heidi Magellan.

  I got a lot of hits, especially from our hometown paper. The L.A. Times had still employed a large staff back in 1995, and they’d followed every lurid twist of the Magellan murder trial.

  Stephen Ivan Dumbrowski was born in 1970 and raised in Carson, a blue-collar town near Long Beach. He was smart enough to get accepted into UC Berkeley and dumb enough to drop out after one year and return home. He’d held various low-level jobs, but his main income came from dealing drugs. He worked for a midlevel dealer with Mexican connections who supplied a lot of the surf crowd up and down the coast, a man named Barry “the Barracuda” Gibson.

  I looked up, suddenly unable to read any longer. The letters shimmied on the screen, not making sense. My heart pounded against my ribs and I couldn’t catch my breath.

  The past burst through.

  Barracuda.

  Again, I saw the dissipated, aging beachboy in the hallway of the beach bungalow in Playa del Rey. Smoking and waiting. Lying in wait. The sense of dread and menace emanating from him. The freakishly swollen gut. And later the streaky wh
ite fluid on Anabelle’s thigh, the smirk on Ivan’s face.

  “The Barracuda got his taste.”

  I typed in Barry “the Barracuda” Gibson.

  Almost immediately, a raft of stories popped up.

  Barry “the Barracuda” Gibson had been murdered on November 13, 1995, killed execution-style with a shot to the head outside his car after a night of drinking at the Fisherman’s Net, a squalid bar near the Redondo Beach Pier.

  Slowly, my heart rate slowed. My fingers sagged on the keys.

  The Barracuda was dead.

  It was only then that I realized how long he’d inhabited my nightmares; a shadowy, sinister bogeyman all the more frightening because I’d glimpsed him only once and had no idea who he was.

  The murder had never been solved, although rumors swirled that he’d been whacked by the Mexican Mafia, which was then in the process of consolidating its Los Angeles operations and eliminating the middleman. There was also a quote from a deputy district attorney who’d prosecuted Gibson on an earlier drug charge.

  “It couldn’t happen to a nicer guy,” the prosecutor said. “He was a real piece of work, a true psychotic and sadist who took pleasure in corrupting young girls.”

  I shuddered, then toggled back to Stephen Ivan Dumbrowski. After years of low-level crimes, he had been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, Heidi Magellan, a stripper who worked the bevy of “gentlemen’s clubs” near LAX. The couple lived in a shabby apartment on 96th Street in Inglewood, right under the flight path. Magellan and Dumbrowski fought all the time. Even over the roar of the jets, the neighbors heard screams, thuds, crockery breaking. The cops would be called. The district attorney’s office told the press the jury would convict.

  Then at the eleventh hour, the defense produced a Mexican police chief who testified that Dumbrowski had been in a Tijuana jail the night Heidi Magellan was murdered.