Designer Crimes

by Lia Matera

  I ignored the question. “I’m going to go look for my party.” I stood and walked away, certain he’d follow. But I’d rather have him trailing behind than sitting beside me.

  I hadn’t taken five steps before Sandy entered, duffel slung carelessly over his shoulder, laptop case in his hand. His glance over my head told me Bill was indeed close behind. His greeting was a public, “Hello. Which way to the car?” His free arm went around me, turning me. We marched almost into and hastily past Bill. But our problems came from behind.

  A hand on my shoulder nearly pulled me off balance. By the time I recovered equilibrium, a half dozen people had surged past to stand in front of us. Sandy positioned himself as a shield.

  I remembered other times he’d blocked me from cameras, offering me the option of shuffling behind his bulldozing body. He’d be expecting my hand on his back now, motioning him to move aside. It didn’t pay to run from reporters. Might as well refuse to comment, or make some vacant, unincriminating statement. To push past was to invite misinterpretation. Whereas in these investigatively moribund days, the press was likely to quote even obvious bullshit without comment.

  I could feel Sandy’s surprise at my hesitation. He glanced over his shoulder, his brows high with inquiry.

  “Let’s go,” I said. “Let’s just diddy.”

  “Oh, come on, Ms. Palma,” one of the reporters protested. “Give us a minute.”

  A photographer added, “Quick pose, okay? Get this guy out of the way, okay?”

  Sandy began to walk in the wide, step-aside manner of the cop he’d been. I followed as if sewn to his jacket.

  “Ms. Di Palma, where is Bradley Rommel?”

  “How did Catherine Piatti end up at the mall? Was she alive or dead?”

  “Are you just arriving from San Francisco, Ms. Di Palma? Did your client call you?”

  I heard the whir of a video camera behind me and made the mistake of turning. On some station tonight there would be footage of me looking foolish and startled and underdressed.

  Sandy kept walking, preceded by backward-trotting reporters.

  “Ms. Di Palma, can you tell us about the airplane?” “Can you tell us where your client is?” “Is Bradley Rommel in custody?” “Was Cathy Piatti already dead?” “Can you comment?” “A few quick photographs—get your best side.” “Come on, Laura, give us a smile.” “Give us a break.” “Give us your take on this.”

  They surrounded the car when we finally got there, video cameras hoisted and microphones outstretched. I drove through them carefully, conscious of my desire to plough them down, giving them my “take” for real. I watched their gestures of anger and disappointment in my rearview mirror. They might not get another crack at me before their sound bites were due at the station.

  Leaving the airport parking lot, I suppressed the desire to turn north instead of south. My cousin Hal was in Alaska, indulging his antisocial nature. It sounded like a fine idea to me.

  “Getting a little harder to believe it wasn’t supposed to be you,” Sandy commented.

  “What wasn’t supposed to be me?”

  “Kinsley.”

  I’d almost forgotten about Kinsley. “Why?”

  “Because trouble’s following you everywhere you go.”

  Just what I wanted to hear.

  18

  Sandy and I noticed the commotion before we rounded the corner onto Clarke. We glimpsed the yellow plastic of police-line tape in the ravine. The heavy sky muted reds and blues from police lights in the street.

  “Uncle Henry.” Fear strangled me.

  I nearly slammed into two uniformed officers standing in the middle of the road. I braked to a whiplash stop.

  “No ambulance. Wrong vehicles,” Sandy pointed out. A city cruiser and a sheriff’s car blocked the street. More surprising, a hazardous waste car with a nuclear symbol was parked directly in front of my house.

  Sandy was right. The scene didn’t suggest injury. A crime was being investigated.

  “Brad showed up.” I replaced one foreboding with another. “Maybe they arrested him for arson.” I hoped I’d arrived in time to keep him from saying anything.

  “They blocked off the gully,” Sandy contradicted. No need to throw up a police line if Rommel was in custody. Unless, perhaps, he was hiding there. “Reporters five minutes behind us,” he reminded me.

  I’d have to do some fast thinking after some even faster inquiry. I jumped out of the car, not bothering to pull it over.

  The sheriff’s deputy and city cop I’d almost hit were in my face before I took two steps.

  “You’ll have to leave the area.” The cop waved me away without really looking at me.

  “My uncle lives there.” I pointed to the Victorian, wondering if Uncle Henry was inside. I needed to know he was safe. Since my father’s death, my uncle seemed a fragile and transitory blessing. “Henry Di Palma.” I guessed they knew it was the mayor’s house. “Is he all right?”

  “Yeah.” The deputy seemed surprised by the question. The city cop trotted over to his cruiser, speaking into the radio. “But you’ll have to move your car. We don’t want it getting hit.”

  Sandy, whom I hadn’t noticed behind me, said, “I’ll take care of it.”

  “What’s going on?” I demanded. If Rommel was in the ravine, I wanted to know now, before anyone began to question him.

  There was shouting and commotion to our left, coming from the Victorian’s back yard. I gave the deputy a second to collect his wits and say something. When he didn’t, I slid by to see for myself.

  At least two men tried to stop me as I walked through the side yard past the dripping rhododendrons and rose bushes. “I live here,” I informed them and walked on.

  In the back yard, where the lawn rolled down to a deep tangle of gully, Jay Bartoli squatted beside something. Whatever it was, there were tarps on the lawn around it. Men with zip lock evidence bags walked from the site. Two photographers stood chatting, cameras dangling from their hands. A half-empty sack of plaster littered a flower bed.

  Apparently, casts of footprints had been taken, evidence had been gathered and bagged, photographs had been snapped. In the two hours since I’d left the house.

  I approached Bartoli and the tarps with trepidation. This couldn’t be about Rommel. The scene was wrong for a capture and an arrest. Clearly, they’d found a thing, not a person. Even from across the yard, I could see that Bartoli stared at something no bigger than a small dog.

  Within two paces, I knew it was a bucket. Another rusty old fisherman’s bucket.

  I stopped, conscious of my feet sinking slightly into the damp lawn. Bartoli, as if sensing me behind him, looked over his shoulder. The men who’d tried to stop me now walked past, conferring with Bartoli as he rose from his squat.

  I approached more slowly now that I knew what they’d found. Jay maintained eye contact with me as he spoke to the men, saying, “Call in that I’m questioning her.”

  Sandy caught up to me, grabbing my elbow and murmuring in my ear, “You’ll get more out of Bartoli alone. I’m going to go chat up the help.” He was gone so suddenly I wasn’t sure the conversation had happened at all.

  Jay met me at the edge of a blue tarp. He gestured behind him. “I was having a last look before the HazMat people take it to the lab.”

  Hazardous material—blood was among the scariest since identification of the AIDS virus.

  “We’ve been over the yard area. We’re out there now”—he gestured at the gully—“expanding the scope. See if we can get a lead on who left this.”

  I stepped past him, but he thrust his arm in front of me to bar my way.

  “I’m not going to touch it, Jay. I just want to see how much is in the bucket.”

  “More,” he said simply.

  The other bucket had contained one and a half
liters, not a fatal blood loss, but close to it. If this one contained more, all from the same person, then that person was dead for sure.

  “It’s Brad’s blood,” I worried. “I thought I’d find you out here arresting him. But I’ll bet it’s his blood. I’ll bet that’s why I haven’t heard from him.”

  “If he did all this—the mall, the plane, the bucket—he’s long gone; that’s what I think. We’ll be meeting with Connie Gold as soon as we’re done here.” Jay’s face was pinched, creped with tiny lines like an old cowboy’s. “See about revoking bail.”

  “You’re talking about Brad.” We’d smoked joints with him in high school, hung out (in my case, sneaked out) with him. “Not just somebody.”

  “It’s been a long time since we knew him, Laura. Nice kids harden up over the years. The good stuff gets layered over.” He gripped my arm. “Everybody in prison has childhood friends that remember good things about them.” But his eyes were bright with the plea that I contradict him.

  It struck a sour note, somehow. Brad was my client, I’d renewed the connection. But Brad and Jay had been out of touch for over twenty years. What made Jay so sure? So maudlin?

  He let go of my arm, blinking at whatever he saw in my face.

  I repeated, “I want to look at the bucket.”

  He didn’t stop me this time.

  I took a few cautious paces forward. The air smelled strongly of pine and skunk cabbage and mud, as if the tramping of men had broken some settled membrane and released the essence of the gully. The wind rustled through its broad-leafed plants, whistling the anthem of cold foliage. In the center of the tarps on a tiny patch of uncovered lawn was the bucket, dented and rough with rust. Inside, filling it to the two-thirds mark, blood had congealed to a purplish pulp almost as thick as liver. A few small oak leaves were trapped on its surface, a few pine needles, what might be bits of lichen or ash. In spots, the surface was depressed as if pocked by water drops. The whole bucket, including contents, was glazed with condensed fog. I guessed it had been outside a while, at least overnight.

  I stood still, willing the bucket to speak to me, to tell me on some cellular level that it contained Brad Rommel. But it spoke to me only as an anomalous horror in my own backyard. I felt nothing more than that.

  I wasn’t sure why I thought I should, why it came as such a shock that I didn’t.

  I turned back to Jay. “What do you know so far?”

  “We got a call telling us Rommel was in your backyard.” His face flushed. He tugged at the collar of his shirt. “The officer who checked the tip found the blood. The call came in at nine fifty-six this morning.”

  Not long after I left the house. “Rommel didn’t put this here.” I watched Jay carefully. Maybe he knew different. “Why would he? I’m his lawyer. Whatever kind of statement this makes, I’m not the person to make it to.”

  “Maybe the statement has to do with you.” Bartoli cocked his head. “It’s got to have crossed your mind.”

  “What?”

  “That Brad’s got a thing about you.”

  “No way.” My surprise couldn’t have been more genuine. “It’s all business, believe me.”

  “He had a thing about you in high school.” Bartoli talked over my attempt to interrupt: “Your breeding and your brains and how confident you were, how you were like Queen Elizabeth or somebody. Somebody imperious.”

  “Every teenager’s imperious,” I protested. “It’s practically the definition of adolescence. Look, I don’t know or care how he felt twenty years ago. There’s nothing but business to our relationship now.” I’d let Jay rattle me. “Whoever called you wanted you to find this. Whoever called you put it here. But it wasn’t Brad. Brad didn’t do any of this.” I almost added, I can feel it.

  Bartoli scowled at me. I couldn’t think why. And why seemed important.

  “Did you find footprints?” I tried to get things back on track.

  “A few partials, we think.”

  “You think?”

  “When the ground’s this wet a big dog stepping on a leaf can make a mark that’ll pass for a partial.” He took two steps closer. “I’m not kidding about Rommel,” he said, with an urgency disproportionate to the situation. “He’s was really gone on you. He had a thing about your power.”

  “My power?” I’d felt enslaved to my family, to my Aunt Diana’s “appearances.”

  “Whatever you’d call it.” His eyes were red-rimmed, his cheeks aflame. He looked almost ill. But then, he’d had very little sleep.

  His voice grew husky. “He really loved you, Laura.”

  I felt the hairs on my neck rise. I’d slept with Jay once when I was nineteen. I’d gone to him when my husband was unfaithful because I’d known he’d say yes. What if Jay was projecting his then-feelings about me onto Brad? What would that do to his investigation? To my case?

  “He doesn’t have a ‘thing’ about me. I’d have picked up on it if he did,” I insisted.

  “You would?” His tone made me wonder if I’d missed noticing something, not about Rommel but about him.

  “Don’t revoke Brad’s bail, Jay.”

  “You know it’s a condition of his bond that he remain available.”

  “That doesn’t mean he can’t go camping in the land above his cabin for half a day.”

  “Are you saying that’s where he is?”

  “That’s where he might be. You don’t have any reason to think otherwise. It hasn’t even been twelve hours.” But I was unsure of both my facts and my law. I’d never had a client on bail drop out of sight.

  “Don’t kid yourself.” Bartoli’s lips curled. “We have enough evidence right now to arrest him for this.” He nodded toward the bucket.

  “You don’t even know what that is. It could be cow’s blood.” I wanted to smack Bartoli for playing sudden hardball.

  “We’re going to get more aggressive, Laura. You can count on it. If you hear from your client, better bring him in fast, or he’ll be sitting in a cell till his trial.”

  No more calling Jay Bartoli for inside information, I was afraid.

  19

  From my bedroom window, I could see the last of the city cops straggle out of the gully to chat with sheriff’s deputies rolling up tarps. Broken twigs of rhododendron, mashed berry vines and skunk cabbage leaves littered the yard. It had just begun to rain, dull and steady, hard enough to be inconvenient but not hard enough to be picturesque.

  Behind me, Sandy said, “Maybe the rain’ll get rid of the reporters.”

  They were out front, barred from the yard by adamant deputies. But once the cops pulled up stakes, the reporters weren’t likely to respect my property rights. They weren’t worth their wages if they did.

  “God, I wish they weren’t here.” I turned to Sandy. “It gets so tiring.”

  I thought back on hundreds of interviews, some at my request and some unwilling. I was not only sick of reporters, I was sick of myself, of my usual responses, whether guarded or goaded. I was sick of my spin, of my own manipulations. It struck me—horrorstruck me—that bouts with the press had made me good at Aunt Diana’s appearances game. And that I was as unhappy playing it today as I’d been at sixteen.

  “Designer crimes.” Sandy lounged against the door, looking somber. “I don’t like what’s been happening to you since you heard Kinsley say that.”

  “Designer crimes?” I couldn’t make the mental leap, not after a night of worrying about Brad Rommel. “Designer crimes is down there.” San Francisco seemed a thousand miles away. “This is up here.”

  “And yet no matter where you go, you’ve got trouble. Literally in your backyard.” His shoulder unstuck from the door. He stood straight, but kept his distance. “I say let’s find out if it’s related. Let’s move faster, do the obvious thing. Let’s try to set More up.”

  “You’ve al
ready eavesdropped on her and followed her,” I pointed out.

  “She knows we followed her—that’s what has me worried. I want to try to turn that around, use it to help reel her in.”

  “Reel her in for what? We don’t know she did anything but have dinner with her boyfriend.” I felt almost light-headed, trying to make the transition from Brad Rommel to Maryanne More. “Can’t we talk about this later? We need to find Rommel.”

  “Agreed. But when we get home, I want to approach More. Tell her we’ve been checking her out, trying to decide if she could help you get a little plain vanilla vengeance. We’re already halfway there. She knows you hate Steve Sayres, but that you can’t prove anything or do much about him. You’re in a perfect spot to tell her you want revenge—not a lawsuit, but revenge.”

  “I can’t do that. She could go to the State Bar. They’re not going to believe I was kidding.” Days like this, I almost wished I would be disbarred. I’d follow my cousin Hal to Alaska. I was glad we’d broken up, almost ready to be friends; certainly ready to visit him. More than ready to embrace hermitry.

  “You could convince the State Bar you didn’t mean it, if it came to that. It might take a little talking, is all. But you might not have to. You might find out exactly what Kinsley meant by designer crimes.”

  “Not if More has any sense. She won’t do anything illegal—assuming she ever does—while they’re investigating Kinsley’s murder.”

  “No?” A quick scowl. “Last I heard it was illegal to eavesdrop electronically without a person’s consent.” He shook his head, taking two strides toward me. “Look, I’ve had my best talent working on this, and I still can’t find a clear set of tracks. We need to know a hell of a lot more about it before something else happens.”

  “By having me pretend to order my own designer crime?” It was a silly notion. With only one thing to recommend it: “I wonder if they could get Sayres, really get him.”

  Sandy grinned. Then his attention shifted to the window behind me. “Reporters,” he told me. “Want me to try to muscle them? Get them out of the yard?”