4 A Dead Mother

by Anna Celeste Burke

  “At least she called and asked for a couple of aspirin. I’m not sure why she mentioned the headache, but not the cramps. The staff might have figured out something was really wrong sooner,” Bernadette offered.

  An hour later, at dinner time and despite the aspirin, the cramps had grown worse, not better. That’s when she’d decided to use “one” of those pills hidden in the lining of her overnight bag. One turned into two and soon she’d taken all of them. How many that was, she couldn’t exactly remember. Too many even to recall what had happened after that.

  The pain had been caused by a ruptured cyst, not fibroids. When an attendant had entered her room to check on her, Alexis was barely breathing. She was bleeding internally, too. At the ER, they’d administered opiate overdose medication, and stabilized her enough to perform emergency surgery. How they managed to do that was a miracle of some kind. Unfortunately, surgery required more pain medication—ring around the rosy! I shook my head and sighed loudly. Bernadette didn’t need superpowers to make sense of that.

  “You’re doing that perverse thing you do, aren’t you? Perverserating or whatever you call it.”

  “Perseverating. Yes, I understand that’s what I’m doing. It’s hard to change bad habits, isn’t it?”

  “It is. That’s why we should pray for Alexis. She has a big bad habit to break that’s been around for a long time.”

  “If she doesn’t break it, her habit just might break her in a way that doesn’t make her stronger.” I leaned back against the headrest and closed my eyes. “I agree with you that Mom seems like she gets it.”

  When Alexis was moved out of the ICU a couple of days ago, she seemed serious. She was, in fact, still on pain meds following her surgery. The surgeon and the rest of her medical team were monitoring her carefully since she was still weak and vulnerable. She was coherent enough to understand what she’d done and how important it was to quit using drugs.

  “At least the cancer’s gone,” Alexis had said. “Unless the pathologist finds something new, I have a few rounds of chemoradiation and then I’ll be good as new. It’s back into drug rehab. Promise!”

  Guilt or remorse must have struck Alexis as I hovered over her, standing at her bedside as she spoke brightly of cancer and being good as new. I was wise to her now, though. I recognized her attempt to play the gracious hostess, even lying on her back in a hospital bed with an IV attached to her. Her lighthearted tone of voice didn’t fool me either. I finally understood how she used her cheery socialite routine as a skillfully-crafted cover for her real feelings. Her eyes had teared up when she saw that I was still wearing a cast from my escapade at the top of Mt. San Jacinto with Libby Van Der Woert and her psycho psychiatrist. At least she stopped the breathy Jackie O socialite routine when those tears threatened.

  “All you need is more craziness in your life, courtesy of your mother. I’m glad you still love me after the trouble I’ve caused,” Alexis mumbled. Then a tear had slipped down her cheek. I was stunned. My mother rarely cried.

  “Mom, it’s okay. I’m grateful you’re alive. Heck, I’m grateful I’m alive to be grateful that you’re alive. Just get well, okay?” That had made her smile.

  “It does seem kind of like a miracle that we’re both still hanging around, doesn’t it?” When my cynical, agnostic mother had asked that question, a tingle had rippled through me. Father Martin’s words had sprung to mind, too, as I bent down to place kisses on my mother’s forehead and cheek.

  “A wake-up call,” the priest had said after I went to him about the havoc wreaked in my life by scumbags. Had her confrontation with mortality been a wake-up call for my mother? That would be as big a miracle as escaping our recent close calls with the Grim Reaper. Father Martin was way ahead of me when I spoke to him.

  “A miracle,” Father Martin had exclaimed, when I described my most recent clashes with “la crème de la crud,” my term for lowlifes hiding behind wealth and position while doing their dirty deeds.

  “An everyday miracle,” Bernadette had assured us later in response to Alexis’ speculation about being snatched back from death’s door.

  Had that possibility—that everyday miracles happen, along with the shock of her own close encounter with death, pushed Mom to look at things from a different angle? I wondered as Bernadette and I sat in traffic.

  “Do you believe mom buys that ‘weller-than-well’ idea they use in rehab?” Supposedly, the process of recovery left a recovering addict better off than someone who lived a drug-free, but unexamined life.

  “Maybe. She’s spent a lot of her life sick. If she’s not sick of being sick, she should be. I don’t know who wouldn’t be. Any steps she takes have gotta make her weller than she was, right?”

  “Yes. Let’s hope that sick of being sick stuff she says is true, too. She needs her strength if she’s going to fight her addiction and get through chemo at the same time. I’ve never seen her this weak and exhausted.”

  “We gotta stay positive and give her extra strength to do that,” Bernadette said as she inched along toward our exit.

  “Yeah, I hear you. It’s hard to rest in the hospital with round-the-clock checks by nurses and doctors poking at her. Maybe when she’s back in rehab, she’ll sleep better and really will be as good as new soon.”

  “Better than new,” Bernadette added.

  When we arrived at my mother’s bedside half an hour later, she was sitting up chatting with Giovanni. Husband number four, in his sixties, is an attractive Italian man who runs a shipping empire. Not an easy business to be in now that China has entered the global competition. Especially with the world economy struggling. That meant there was less business to go around in an increasingly competitive industry.

  “Why not retire, Giovanni? Stay here in California with me until I can return with you to Monaco, Nice, or Switzerland, or to your boat.”

  “Ship, Lexi, it’s a ship not a boat.” Giovanni spoke excellent English, but his voice had a lovely lilt to it. His accent became more pronounced when he was excited or upset as he was now.

  “Oh, alright. Ship. Personally, I like yacht the best anyway.” Alexis adopted a pouty look with her bottom lip poked out a bit.

  “Mom, can we come in? We don’t want to intrude if you’re in the middle of something.” Giovanni sprang to his feet and almost ran to greet us with a warm embrace and kisses on both cheeks, too, in true continental fashion.

  “Buon pomeriggio!” He said as he escorted us to my mother’s bedside. “We were just talking about our plans once your mother is done with the chemo and the Betty Ford and well enough to travel again. I have to return to my business in Monaco for a little while, but Alexis would prefer that I stay here in California.”

  “Betty Ford? Mom, does that mean you’re coming back to the desert?”

  “Yes, Baby Girl. I’m persona non-grata at the Malibu clinic. Besides, at Betty Ford I can go back into rehab and do chemo at the Medical Center next door. I’m moving tomorrow or the next day—by ambulance, I believe.”

  “We’ll drive you,” I said, glancing at the cast on my forearm. “I can drive. Bernadette can, too.”

  “I don’t think they quite trust me to get there on my own—even with you two escorting me.”

  “I don’t care how you get there. It’ll be wonderful to have you that close,” I said. “Giovanni can stay with us and we can take care of you while he’s dealing with business matters.”

  “That’s what I said!” Giovanni cried out from the foot of Mom’s hospital bed. “See? We are thinking on the same wavelength. Besides, I won’t be gone long.”

  “Just let us know when you expect to return so we can get a suite ready for you at the house in Rancho Mirage.” Bernadette was always thinking about how to take care of people.

  “Grazie, Santa Bernadette! So, it’s all arranged. You go to the desert and I go to Monaco. In a few weeks, I’ll be back and we’ll see then when you will be well enough to come home with me to Monaco.”

&n
bsp; “Okay, Giovanni, but I worry about you traveling and all the stress you’re facing in your business dealings. You’ll be seventy soon. I, I…” I couldn’t believe it, but Alexis was tearing up as if on the verge of weeping.

  Who was this woman? I wondered.

  “I make you a deal, cara mia. You get well—get over the cancer and make a clean start without the drugs. If you give up the drug addiction, I’ll give up my work addiction. I don’t know what we’ll do then, but we’ll figure it out together.” Alexis brightened.

  “Will you do that—give up your work? It’s the thing you love most!” Mom exclaimed. Giovanni moved from the foot of the bed to her side—opposite from where I stood. He took her hand.

  “I will, if you will give up what you love most.” He spoke in a soft, serious tone. “If you believe my first love is work, you’re wrong. Please give me hope that I am wrong, too, and your first love is me, not the drugs.”

  Now I was tearing up. So was Bernadette. Mom was a goner, sobbing openly. Giovanni and I each held a hand. I felt her grasp tighten. It was a lovely moment that didn’t last long. Giovanni’s phone rang. Then mine.

  5 The French Connection

  Butterflies flitted in my stomach when I heard the voice of the caller. Tiramisu, anyone? I was surprised by how relieved I also felt to hear from him—even using the hokey Bogart voice.

  “How’s it going, Doll?” Frank asked.

  Anticipation followed the relief. I was eager to get his take on the latest episode of Hollywood Babylon in which I was an unwilling costar. A surge of worry suddenly kept me from acknowledging my desire for the counsel I sought from him. Maybe it was guilt about my recent, unscripted, rendezvous with lemon meringue pie. Or maybe a surge of what my shrink referred to as counter-dependency—my almost pathological need not to depend on others.

  “How do you imagine it’s going? I’m in the waiting room outside my drug-addicted mother’s hospital room, hoping she recovers from emergency surgery so she can get on with chemoradiation and rehab. Woohoo!”

  “Whoa, take a deep breath! I didn’t mean to set you off.” No more Bogart, now it was pure Frank Fontana on the other end of that phone. “If this isn’t a good time to talk, I can track you down later. Unless you don’t want me to do that either.” Frank was on the verge of getting huffy. I couldn’t blame him. I slumped into a chair in the nearly empty waiting room. A weary occupant sitting in the opposite corner was dozing.

  “I’m sorry. You didn’t deserve that. It’s been a long, weirdly disturbing day that included escaping down an alley to avoid reporters.” My bottom lip poked out, just like Mom’s had done earlier. I forcibly stopped the pouting, tucking my lip back in. Then I noticed that the lovely pair of Manolo Blahnik suede heels I had on were splotched with some hideous substance.

  Oh, ick, I thought. It had to be slime from that back-alley getaway. I had to bite my bottom lip to keep it from betraying my inner child as a hopelessly spoiled one.

  “I heard about some of it. Not just from my buddies who like to razz me about hanging out with the rich and famous lady lawyer. Evie called me, worried about you. She was going to call you herself to make you promise you won’t be alone with your ex-husband until they’re sure he’s not a murderer.”

  “That poor kid. I’m sorry to worry her like that. She must have seen news coverage about what happened in court today. Do they have pictures from inside the courtroom?”

  “Yes and a tiny snippet of video, too. Cassie’s lunging for Jim with her cane raised like a maniac, while calling him a murderer!”

  “Isn’t that awful? I wouldn’t put it past either one of them to have murdered Marty Hargreaves. Jim’s made it clear he’s no boy scout given his behavior, but neither was Hargreaves from what Jerry told me today.”

  “That’s one reason I called. I’m not sure if, or when, this is going to get out, but I wanted to give you a heads up in case it does. Hargreaves has been under surveillance for some time by the DEA. He’s one of dozens of guys they’ve been tracking as part of an effort to break up a major drug smuggling ring. He was a minor player in a project the guys around here call the French Connection.”

  “The French Connection—that’s odd. The drugs must be coming from Mexico, aren’t they?”

  “They are, but at the center of the operation is a group located in Perris—like Paris, even though it’s not spelled the same way.”

  “No kidding? Please don’t tell me too near where you and the kids are living?”

  “Not next door, but they’re in my community and others nearby. It’s another consequence of the fact our area was at the epicenter of the real estate meltdown. I got a great house for the kids at an excellent price, but so did members of the drug cartels. They snapped up foreclosed homes or bought spec homes at bargain basement prices from builders on the verge of bankruptcy. Some are being used as suburban stash houses, even in gated communities like mine.”

  “I’m not sure why I’m surprised. It makes perfect sense. Their product is safer behind the gates too.”

  “Yes. There’s less crime than in more rundown neighborhoods and that means fewer incidents to attract the interest of the local police. Pretty savvy. They’re also discrete enough not to tip off the neighbors that they’re living near a distribution site. The last thing they want to do is draw attention to themselves. We’re not far from the border, and as close as we are to I-10, it’s a perfect jumping off point for transport of drugs along that East-West corridor across the country. Anyway, when the police ran Hargreaves’ prints as part of the investigation into the disturbance at Jim’s house in Bel Air, a flag popped up.”

  “Oh, good grief! The revelation about Hargreaves’ involvement must be a recent development. Jerry gave me an update at lunch and he didn’t mention it.”

  “I’m not sure it would have come to life at all until Hargreaves died and the police investigation was turned over to homicide. I’m not sure how the DEA is handling this, but they have had conversations with the District Attorney’s office and Paul Worthington about it. They probably would have preferred to keep Hargreaves’ status buried, but Paul’s team would have discovered it anyway. I wouldn’t be surprised if Paul finds the drug trafficking angle useful to Jim’s defense.”

  “Wow, Jerry did say there were drugs at the scene. Does that mean my underhanded ex-husband has become embroiled in the drug trade?” I asked.

  “No. If that were the case, the DEA would have gotten much more involved in Jim’s situation than they are. My guess is that Hargreaves was supplying drugs to Cassie, among the other services he seems to have been providing.” There was a sarcastic tone in his voice when he said, “other services.”

  “You must be as in the loop as Bernadette when it comes to the gossip about Hargreaves’ role as Cassie’s handler,” adding my own note of sarcasm to the conversation.

  “Yes, but I’m only speculating that Hargreaves was Cassie’s supplier since I’m not privy to inside information on why they had him under surveillance. What I understand, though, is that most of the people they’ve been keeping tabs on, apart from the ring leaders in Perris, are low level dealers working in their distribution network.”

  “This reminds me of that Weeds television series where the widowed, suburban housewife decides to go into the drug business from behind the gates of her upscale neighborhood. More organized than the way that Mary Louise Parker character portrayed it, I guess.”

  I didn’t ask, but I also wondered how many communities in the desert might have the same problem. It had never occurred to me that the “investors” who gobbled up properties when the real estate bubble burst might include cash-flush drug lords and their minions. And yet, it made perversely good sense.

  “Yes, and they’re selling more than weed—cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin, and just about anything else a drug user wants to buy. I’m hoping these DEA guys will warn me before they go in and bust my neighbors, if that’s what they end up doing.”

 
; “I hope so, too. I’m glad you’re not involved in the investigation. That ought to keep you and your kids from getting caught up any danger, right?”

  “Aw, now you’re worrying about Evie, aren’t you?”

  “Yep, one worrywart worrying about another—what else is new?”

  “I promise, if I hear there’s going to be trouble close to home, I’ll take the kids and make a run for it to Mom and Dad’s house in Palm Desert.”

  “That’s a relief,” I said, letting out an audible sigh. “I don’t want anything to happen to you either, Frank.” How much that mattered to me was almost shocking.

  “I’ll do my best. I won’t wear a cast as well as you do, Doll.” A hint of Bogey was back and it lightened my spirits. “Until this becomes public knowledge in one way or another, this is just between the two of us, okay?”

  “Sure, I’d prefer to stay out of Jim’s trouble. Fortunately, I don’t have any formal role in the latest calamity that has clobbered Jim, quite literally. As far as I can tell, the only interest Paul has in me is the same one he has in you—our statements about what Jim said and what we did when the jerk called me that night.”

  “I’m certain Paul has more interest in you than that,” Frank said with an edge in his voice. “I’ve seen, firsthand, the way he looks at you. Not that I can blame him for that. I’ve heard through the grapevine that you’ve been seeing him.”

  “Seeing him?” I felt myself flush, as if I’d been caught with my hand in a cookie jar. Frank couldn’t be referring to that incident at my Dad’s house, so I tried to pull myself together before I spoke again. “I’m not sure what communiques you’ve received via the grapevine, but I do happen to work at the same law firm with him. We’ve been to dinner and to galas together—that’s no secret. He’s a friend, too. So, what?”

  That friendship had included enjoyable evenings watching old film noir movies and less formal dinners, too. That was no excuse for Frank to jump to conclusions based on rumors. I was becoming defensive, but why not? Frank always manages to get under my skin one way or another. That’s true even when he’s not standing in front of me with his dark eyes peering at me as if he could expose my innermost thoughts. Besides, I felt guilty about the fact that I found both men in my life enticing. Odd, too, given how sensitive I still am about Jim’s betrayal. Not that I’d made any promises to anyone. Frank interrupted my digression into self-examination.