Too Little, Too Late

by Marta Tandori

  The newlyweds muttered something appropriate as they alighted from Liz’s minibus before making a beeline towards the hotel, blissfully oblivious to the disapproving stares from the two spinster sisters following them at a safe distance. Liz quickly looked at her watch. She had another tour starting in less than half an hour. With any luck, she’d have just enough time to get to the designated pick up spot over on Sunset.

  Putting her minibus in reverse, she pulled up short as an unfamiliar four-door came to a stop behind her, blocking her way. Two men in suits got out of the vehicle, followed closely by Otis, who had been in the back seat.

  “Ote!” Liz looked at him in surprise. “What are you doing here?”

  “Hey, Liz,” came his subdued response.

  “I thought you were off today,” she continued, eyeing the two strangers with interest. “Who’re these guys?”

  “I’m Detective Warner and this is my partner, Detective Cassidy,” replied the older of the two men, flashing Liz his badge. “L.A.P.D.”

  Liz looked at Otis. “Are these guys friends of yours?”

  “Not exactly.” Otis fidgeted uncomfortably. “They’re here to talk to you.”

  “About what?”

  “We’d like you to come down to Hollywood Division with us.”

  “What for?” Liz asked. The fact that everyone looked so serious immediately put her on edge.

  “Because it would be better to talk to you there than in this parking lot,” the one identified as Detective Cassidy told her.

  “Either you tell me what this is about or I stay exactly where I am,” she told him stubbornly.

  “This is about a hit and run that occurred late yesterday afternoon on North Pinero,” Detective Warner informed her.

  “And you’re thinking I had something to do with it?” Liz asked worriedly. “I mean I was working, but I had the Beverly Hills/Bel Air run.” She looked at the older detective’s face but it remained impassive. “Otis can vouch for me and so could the forty or so passengers in my minibus yesterday.”

  “Has anything been stolen from you recently?” asked Detective Cassidy suddenly.

  “Stolen?” she repeated blankly.

  “Or is unaccounted for,” offered his partner helpfully.

  “No.” Liz shot Otis a confused look but he studiously avoided her gaze. She was losing her patience. “Look, I already told you. I didn’t have anything to do with the hit and run nor did I have anything stolen recently. Can I go now?”

  “The victim of the hit and run was carrying a backpack.”

  Liz’s heartbeat quickened. “A backpack?”

  “Uh-huh.” Detective Warner watched Liz’s face carefully. “And inside the backpack was a prescription with your name and address on it.”

  “You said there was a victim,” she managed to ask. “Who was it?”

  “An unidentified woman,” his partner explained. “We were hoping you’d be able to tell us who she was.”

  “Was?” Liz looked at them with huge, fearful eyes.

  She didn’t notice as Otis came up beside her and took her hand. “Your mom died on impact, Liz. I’m so sorry.”

  “No!!!!” Liz’s world began spinning out of control until there was nothing left but blackness.

  ***

  There was no way the police could connect him to the car. His face had been obscured by an old baseball cap and he’d painstakingly wiped every visible surface of the car before he’d abandoned it. No, he’d certainly covered his tracks well enough and by all accounts, Maria’s death barely rated a short paragraph in the L.A. Times.

  His hand visibly shook as he anxiously flipped through the Los Angeles Daily News, noting that the hit and run didn’t even rate coverage. Most of the coverage had come from that bleeding heart publication, the Los Angeles Downtown News, which had devoted an entire small column and the headline “Homeless Woman Victim of Hit and Run”. Nothing to worry about, he reassured himself. In the cesspool of crime that was Los Angeles, a hit and run involving the homeless rated about as much attention as another drive-by in East L.A.

  No one would connect him to Maria’s murder. No one even cared. He thought of her innocence and his stomach churned. He remembered her face just before he’d struck her with the car and felt a sharp pain, like a knife twisting in his gut. A thin sheen of sweat broke out on his forehead and upper lip. Even if no one cared, he cared. The urge to throw up became overwhelming. What have I done?

  His half-brother, Irving, had found the investigator’s report in his father’s safe after his father’s death. He was shocked and sickened by the fact that his stepfather, one of Hollywood’s most respected directors, was a Nazi war criminal and the girl that they’d raped had been Karl’s own daughter. Being the weak imbecile that his brother was, he pulled out of the governor’s race and tried to commit suicide but he couldn’t even manage to pull that off properly. After pressure from their mother, Irving reluctantly told his mother about Kate and the rape. It was his mother who had recognized the threat Kate and her daughter posed to the family and it was also his mother who had come up with the plan to stage the child’s death and give her a new identity. Ironically, while it was his father that had been the Nazi, his mother was far more ruthless in getting what she wanted, even if it meant blackmailing the child’s doctor into helping her carry out her plan. But the one thing his mother hadn’t counted on was falling in love with another woman’s child.

  Despite his better judgment, Leo finally went to see this creature that had captivated his mother. He did so reluctantly, forced to deliver a shiny new bicycle with training wheels his mother wanted her to have, yet driven by a need to see firsthand his mother’s folly. He would have been lying to say he had not been curious, yet the significance of the girl’s existence had diminished for him somewhat, wrapped up as he had been with his own wife and their new life together. But for his mother, she had spoken of, yearned for and cared about no one else for the past nine years but this young girl borne of his father’s and brother’s shameful deviance.

  The sight that had awaited him was one that would be etched on his brain for the rest of his life. Her room could have been any young girl’s room, from the rocking chair with the comforter draped over the arm to the picture of his mother in the silver frame. The only thing that set it apart from every other girl’s room was the special bed with the built-in restraints and the utter pandemonium as two orderlies tried to hold the girl down while a nurse gave her a sponge bath. The girl’s nude body has smears of dried blood all over her legs and torso and she was screaming at the top of her lungs.

  “What happened to her?” he asked sharply.

  “Who are you?” asked the nurse in annoyance, as the girl kicked the sponge out of her hand.

  When he told her, her attitude immediately became respectful. “Some days, like today, we can’t get her to wear any clothes. She menstruated for the first time today and became unduly alarmed.” She waited for the orderly to pull the girl’s legs apart before retrieving the sponge and applying it to the girl’s inner thigh. “Once I get her cleaned up, I’ll give her a shot to calm her down.”

  “You mean drug her,” he clarified.

  The nurse never heard him as the girl managed to get one of her feet loose, sending the basin of bloodied water flying before it hit the nurse head on.

  He went over to the bed. Removing the sponge from the nurse’s hand, he quickly took charge of the situation.

  “Why don’t you go get changed and I’ll deal with cleaning her up.” The tone of his voice brooked no refusal. When the nurse and orderlies left the room, he turned to the girl. “Hello, Maria. It’s time you and I finally met.”

  CHAPTER 24

  “Grounded! You’re not being fair!” Karen threw herself onto the sofa, glaring at her mother in mutiny. “You’re treating me as if I was a criminal.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous.” Eve ignored her daughter’s sullen outburst. “You know why you’re being grounded.
Your father and I both agree on this.”

  “Great!” Karen argued bitterly. “Why is it the one time you two happen to agree on something, it’s about my punishment.”

  “Don’t think of it as punishment,” Eve suggested. “Think of it as a period of reflection.”

  “Not funny,” she bit back. “Just because I was hanging with Laurie, who you can’t stand, I get punished for it.” She grabbed one of the cushions and hugged it to her chest. “Well, you can’t treat me like this, you know. I’m not some little kid you can send to the corner for a time out.”

  Eve rolled her eyes. “If only it were that simple.” She looked at her mother, who was sitting on one of the kitchen stools, sipping a mug of coffee. “Feel free to throw in your two cents’ worth.”

  “I never should have asked Karen to stop by my house to drop off those boxes,” Kate told her daughter quietly. “I blame myself for what happened.”

  “Mom, please!”

  “It’s true,” Kate told them.

  “Come on, Grams!” Karen threw the cushion back onto the sofa and went over to her grandmother. “You had nothing to do with what happened. If that stupid woman wouldn’t have been screwing around with your mailbox or attacked Laurie, nothing would’ve happened to her. I just wish I knew what she’d been up to.”

  “Can you please drop it!” Eve slammed the refrigerator door with more force than she intended. “You heard what that detective told us. There was nothing in your grandmother’s mailbox. They looked.”

  “So you’re saying I’m a liar?” asked Karen, staring at her mother intently.

  “No,” Eve replied. “I’m just saying that maybe you were mistaken.”

  “That’s just great.” Karen’s stared at her mother with wounded eyes. “My own mother doesn’t believe me.”

  “It’s not that I don’t believe you,” Eve argued. “But if she was trying to put something in the mailbox, where is it?”

  “I don’t know, okay?”

  “Better yet, let’s go with the theory that she took something out of your grandmother’s mailbox. What was it and where is it? The police didn’t find anything on the woman when they examined her.”

  “How the hell should I know?” Karen yelled at her.

  Eve took a deep calming breath. “Why don’t you sit down and I’ll fix you something to eat.”

  “I’m not hungry,” was her daughter’s sullen response.

  “How about a game of poker?” Kate offered. They had been known to play for hours at a time.

  “I’m not in the mood,” Karen told her before turning back to her mother. “Thank God you believe me about the car, at least. Without those stupid skid marks on the road, you probably would’ve thought I was making that up, too.”

  “You’re being ridiculous!” Eve snapped back.

  “Am I?” Karen asked her.

  Eve put down the head of lettuce she’d been washing and stared at her daughter. “I believe you tried to help that woman and I believe someone ran her over. Okay?”

  “Then let me tell my story on Letterman,” Karen implored eagerly.

  Eve stared at her daughter in disbelief. “So, that’s what this is about? You want to go on Letterman?”

  “It doesn’t have to be Letterman,” Karen quickly told her. “I can always do Entertainment Tonight or Access Hollywood. Take your pick.”

  “I pick nothing!” Eve shook her head vehemently before throwing down the knife she’d been holding. “So forget about it, okay?”

  “No, it’s not okay!” Karen argued. “You saw what it was like when we left the police station. There were cameras everywhere! Everybody wants to know my side of the story. Why won’t you let me tell them?”

  “Because they don’t care about the victim of the hit and run,” Eve tried to explain. “What they care about is exploiting the fact that I was once famous, your grandmother was once famous, you’re my daughter, and now this has happened. If any of those shows were genuinely interested what happened, then why did they want to interview me and your grandmother as well?”

  “Oh my God, Mom!” Karen shrieked angrily. “For once in your life, get over yourself. This isn’t about you, it’s about me!” She ran over to the front window and lifted the slats of the plantation shutters. “Do you really think all those people camped out on our street give a shit that you used to be on some stupid TV show way back when?”

  “Do you honestly think they’d give a shit if you were just anybody’s kid?” Eve hit back. “Don’t fool yourself, even for a minute. You’d be a five second story on the six o’clock news. But the fact that you come from a showbiz family makes it a hot story.” Eve stared with distaste at the hoard of paparazzi camped out on the street in front of her house. “Those people are going to squeeze every last ounce of juice from this story while they can.”

  “So you’re going to keep me locked up in this house like a virtual prisoner just because you’re hung up on yourself?” she asked incredulously.

  “Stop trying to twist things around,” Eve told her. “If I were you, I’d spend a little less time worrying about your public image and a lot more time being remorseful over what happened.”

  Karen’s eyes filled with tears. “Sometimes, Mom, you’re too much!” With that, she ran out of the room in tears.

  Eve was left propped against the kitchen sink, with her head in her hands. “Whatever happened to the nice kid we raised?”

  “She’s still a nice kid,” Kate told her, “but right now, she’s just confused. Once all the excitement dies down, I have a feeling she’ll come around.”

  “I’m not so sure about that.” Eve began shredding the head of lettuce in frustration. “She’s been hanging around with that druggie behind my back not to mention that twenty-year-old who’s supposed to be her boyfriend.” She gave up and threw the rest of the lettuce in the sink. “It’s like I suddenly have no idea who my kid is anymore.”

  “Every kid goes through growing pains.”

  “Growing pains are one thing but this is a full-blown rebellion ever since Eric and I split up.” Eve slumped into the nearest chair. “And now, a woman is dead and all Karen’s worried about is going on Letterman.”

  ***

  Karen was heading towards English class on Wednesday afternoon when she heard Ashley calling out her name. She kept right on walking.

  “Would you wait up!” Ashley finally caught up with her. “What’s your rush?”

  Karen gave her a frosty look. “What do you want?”

  “Why haven’t you called me?”

  “I did call,” she pointed out. “Remember that little screamfest we had over the phone after Josh’s party?”

  “I was just pissed about my nose,” Ashley explained.

  Karen glanced at her friend’s face. “So, how is it?” she asked grudgingly.

  “Nothing that another trip to my nose guy couldn’t fix,” Ashley told her airily.

  “I’m still pissed at you anyway.”

  “Whatever.” Ashley inspected her nails. “I can’t believe you’d be willing to give up our friendship over what happened at Josh’s party.”

  “You don’t deserve my friendship.”

  “I just don’t get why you had to invite that slut, is all,” her friend retorted. “She was way out of her league.”

  “Why do you care?” Karen asked. “She’s my friend.”

  “You need to pick better friends,” Ashley snapped.

  “Thanks. I’ll keep that in mind.” Karen started walking away.

  “Wait!” Ashley caught up with her. “Do you want to hang after school?”

  Karen looked at Ashley in amazement. There was no such thing as rejection in Ashley’s vocabulary. “I can’t. I’m grounded.”

  “You can’t be serious!”

  “The way my parents are acting, I may as well have driven the damn car that killed the woman,” she remarked bitterly. “My mom is really pissed about all the publicity and shit.”

 
; “Then I guess she’s not going to like what I have to show you,” Ashley told her.

  “What are you talking about?” Karen asked suspiciously.

  “This.” Ashley opened her binder and took out a folded newspaper. “I picked this up last night.”

  “What is it?” Karen asked.

  “Just look at the front page, idiot!”

  Karen unfolded the paper. “Aw, shit!” It was Truth or Diss, one of the tabloid rags sold at supermarket checkout lines. The headline screamed, “WILD CHILD OF AMERICA’S TEENAGE SWEETHEART OUT OF CONTROL!” Underneath the headline were two pictures of Karen, one where she was leaving Hollywood Division, and the other where she was caught in the middle of the fight between Ashley and Laurie at Josh’s party. Karen groaned as she scanned the article on page nine. “My mother’s going to go ballistic when she finds out about this.”

  “Don’t tell her,” was Ashley’s immediate response.

  Karen gave her a look of disbelief. “Like you honestly think she’s not going to find out.”

  “Just make sure you’re not around when she does,” was Ashley’s advice.

  “You know what?” Karen turned and started walking back to her locker.

  “What?” asked Ashley, trying to keep up with her.

  “Since my mother’s already going to be pissed at me when she sees the paper, I say screw third period. Let’s go get our nails done.”

  “How about dumping third and fourth so we can get facials while we’re at it,” suggested Ashley.

  “Sounds like a plan. Let’s go!”

  It felt good being friends with Ashley again.

  CHAPTER 25

  Liz came out of her stupor long enough to realize that someone was knocking on her front door. She didn’t have any intention of answering it. After a few minutes, the knocking became more insistent so she grabbed a pillow and threw it over her head to muffle the noise.