by Julie Vail
We slept and woke and found each other again all night long. And as the sun came up over my bedroom window I held her in my arms and I caressed her face and her mouth with my lips and I thought to myself, so this is how it feels. This is how it’s supposed to feel.
When you’re in love.
††††
We got up at one point and ended up in the shower. Then we went back to bed and slept until ten. We hung on to each other while we slept and nothing felt awkward, nothing felt out of place. We awoke and discussed coffee, and possibly dessert as we lay there, and finally we got up and dressed—she in one of my t-shirts and I in whatever I found on the floor. We floated through my house, making coffee, picking up dishes, cleaning up the wax that had spilled over onto the table because we forgot . . . forgot all about the candles that burned through the night while we burned through each other.
The phone rang. She stood in the kitchen with her hands wrapped around a mug of coffee—cream, no sugar. And I stood in the middle of the living room, having just turned the music on, and wondered if I should answer or let the machine get it. The ringing stopped and the machine clicked on.
“John. Hi. I was just calling to see how you’re doing. Call me, okay? Maybe we can get together. Bye.”
It was one of the others.
I stood in the middle of the room, and it suddenly seemed huge. She stood in the kitchen, too far from me now. She smiled one of those ‘it’s okay, I understand’ kind of smiles, but that wasn’t okay with me anymore. I walked over to her and I put my coffee down on the counter. I brought my hand to her face.
“Karen,” I whispered.
She looked down into her coffee, searching for the words. She didn’t speak for a long time. Finally, she said, “Is she important to you?”
“Not at all.” I closed my eyes. “Not even close.” I caressed her face. “You are all I want. You are all I need now.” I lifted her up onto the barstool and I buried my hand in her hair. I closed my eyes.
“I love you. It’s too soon to say it, probably, but I can’t keep it inside me anymore.” I sat on the stool next to her, and I opened my eyes. My heart was overflowing and I realized then that I had never felt this way before. That after forty five years of living, I hadn’t really been alive—until now.
With great tenderness and mercy, she raised her hands to my face. She let her hands rest there, and she brought her forehead to rest against mine.
“This was not supposed to happen, Johnny. But I’m like a moth to your flame.” She looked in to my eyes and nodded her head, as if confirming her worst fears. And then she kissed me, and I lifted her up and carried her back to bed, where we spent the rest of the morning, and into the afternoon, telling each other without words, how hard we tried.
Not to fall.
SIXTEEN
The boy stood under the window and listened to his mother and his uncle Frank talking.
Ten thousand, Frankie. That should do it, for a while. The boy heard his uncle sigh heavily.
Where did you get this, Angie? He heard his mother mutter something about an account, then she said his father’s name.
It’s all yours, Frank, for the business. But I run it, and your wife is out. I mean OUT. I never want to see her again. If you don’t agree, I will buy the business out from under you, then you’ll be out, too.
Angela . . .
Out, Frank. I mean it.
Within a year Alessi Cleaners became Testarossa’s, and he never saw his uncle Frank or his aunt Judy again.
Despite spending the weekend with Karen, I still managed to get into the station by 8 a.m. the following Monday. The lady was something else.
David Crane’s murder hit the front page of the Sunday Times. It began on page A1, and ended in a narrow third column of page A12. No matter. It was out now, and I expected the rabbits to run in every direction. I assumed all those involved with the murder of David Crane could read.
It was September 11th. Flags were flying, and images of that day played over and over again on the news. CNN interviewed victim’s families to see how they were coping, and Fox interviewed the director of Homeland Security, in case we forgot how really secure we were. To us, it was just another day. Still, the air weighed heavy.
Alex and I came in from a call-out on a dead body in Venice. Another homeless man succumbed to the elements, or the dark, or the drink . . . who knows. Any time murder is the suspect, we get the call. Not sure this was the case here, however. But, I’ve been surprised before. Many times. We walked past the four holding cells and toward the door that opened into the area where our offices and interrogation rooms were. Now, on any given day, the cells can be teeming with people, completely empty, or somewhere in between. I usually don’t make eye contact when I walk by, and today was no exception.
“Hey there, tall, red and handsome,” came a husky voice.
“Shit,” I whispered. Alex chuckled. I turned to the voice.
She was six feet tall, and skinny—a buck-forty at the most. Her features were Island, rather than African—angular and smooth, thanks to hormone treatments. As trannies go, she didn’t make a bad looking woman. Her shoulders were muscular, but her arms were thin, and all of it was tucked inside a slinky ice-blue gown of some undetermined material. The dress was low enough to show cleavage, but how much of it actually belonged to her was a mystery. She wore a pair of silver, three-inch strappy come-fuck-mes on her size 12 feet. Her wig today was a burnt orange, and hung past her shoulders. It had seen better days. I’d seen her make better choices in the past. I figured she probably didn’t need to hear that today. I wondered where the hell she’d been, at this time of day, to land her here in the slam.
“Junie, what the hell? It’s three in the fuckin’ afternoon. What are you doing here?”
“Well, you know it was a misunderstandin’, honey. You see how I’m dressed?”
“I see.”
“You liiiike?” she primped, turning slowly so I could judge the look from all angles.
“What happened?” I approached the cell. Junie Joo was annoying, but harmless. What landed her here most often were disturbing-the-peace issues, and an occasional grope complaint in the produce aisle at the grocery store. She had one arrest for solicitation that I knew about. Junie had been around a while, and when she wasn’t turning tricks at the lower-end hotels near the airport, she was hanging around down in West Hollywood, giving the beat cops that patrol Santa Monica Boulevard something to do. Today, however, she was all ours.
“What happened?” she screeched. “What happened, honey? You wanna know?”
“Not really,” I muttered. “C’mon, Junie. You’re a night-owl. You’re just waking up about now.”
“Oh, honey, tell me.” She waved a long, tapered hand in my direction, then sat on the hard bench and crossed her long legs in disgust.
“I’ll see you inside,” said Alex behind me. “Hey, Junie,” he called over his shoulder as he walked out.
“Enchanté, detective,” she cooed.
Alex grunted. He was a lot less tolerant of this sort of thing than I.
“I’ve never had a Latin cop before.”
“I’m in a hurry, Junie . . .”
“Well, I was on my way to a memorial for a friend of mine? Minding my own business? And this . . . oh, this . . . thing . . . pulls me over . . .”
“You were driving? Just thinking about getting behind the wheel should have gotten your ass arrested.” Not only did Junie not own a car, she didn’t even know how to drive. I really didn’t want to know.
“Well, honey, how was I gonna get my hot self to Forest Lawn?”
I shook my head. “Who pulled you over?”
“Oh, that awful . . . what the hell is his name? Like a dog . . .?” She looked at me to see if I had any idea as to what she was talking about. I did not, as usual.
“That Pig. Labrador. That’s it, honey. Labrador. Like the dog.” She sat back, legs still crossed. “P-i-g scum, honey.” The
n she snapped her fingers three times in the air.
Laborteaux. Shit. “You okay? He hurt you?”
“Just my feelins’,” she smiled wanly. She sat forward now. “Honey, listen. I have something for you, but you need to get me out of here. I have to make that memorial, honey.”
“You have something for me?”
“That I do, honey. And it has to do with that body y’all found in Ballona.”
††††
Junie sat in an interrogation room with a soda and a blanket around her shoulders. I saw a faint bruise under her left eye. I’d address that later.
“Honey, first, let me explain. I see a lot of things, and I don’t say boo to a goose. So, this little . . . incident . . . meant nada to me, honey.” She paused. “Until, I saw the article in the paper.”
I sat on the edge of the table next to her. “The article about the body being found in Ballona Creek?”
“The very one, honey.” She waved a bony hand around. “And he was just a boy, wasn’t he? Tsk tsk.” Whatever it was that landed Junie Joo into this life she now led, I never knew her to be disconnected emotionally. This time was no exception. “I should have come forward sooner, but as I said . . . I see many, many things, honey.”
“Junie,” Alex said, finally exasperated. “I’m begging you now . . . begging . . . you to get to the point. You have somewhere to be, right?”
“That I do, honey,” she simpered.
“Then talk. Now.”
“Mmm mmm m m m.” To me, she said, “I love it when he gets all masterful.”
I shook my head. “Don’t push it.”
She waved her hand like she was shooing a fly away. “I’d just come from the Home Depot, honey, and I was standing on the corner of Culver and Lincoln. I crossed the street, because I was . . . waiting for someone, honey . . . if you get my meanin’ . . .?”
“I believe we do. Go on,” I encouraged, not even attempting to venture into why she was in Home Depot. It wasn’t for plumbing supplies, that was for sure.
“So, I’m walking down Culver, honey, and I pass this parked car, and then I see this . . . person . . . running toward me. My heart’s all aflutter, because this is not the person I’m meetin’, honey, and I’m thinking, can a girl get this lucky in one evenin’?” She waved a hand around and looked up at the ceiling disgustedly. “Well, needless to say, honey, he wasn’t runnin’ to me. He was runnin’ to the car. And honey, he was covered in blood.” She made a face. “All down his front. I thought he might be hurt, so I, you know, said, ‘Are you alright, honey?’ and he just ran past me, got in the car, flipped a u-ie, and he was gone like a drag queen with her falsies on fire.”
“Do you remember what kind of car it was?”
“Indeed I do, honey. It was one of those new Hummers. Silver.” She shook a three-inch strappy sandal at me. “My favorite color, in case you wanted to buy me somethin’ fresh, honey.”
“Chambliss’ car,” I said to Alex. It was at the Westchester house the day we visited, and I made note of it when we took his information after his arrest.
“This the person you saw, Junie?” I asked, sliding a picture of Rob Chambliss in her direction.
“That’s him, honey. He do somethin’ bad? I do like a bad boy. Mmmm mmmm, honey.”
“Be right back,” I said, and left the room. I found one of the junior detectives and got him on tracking the whereabouts of Rob Chambliss. If he’d made bail, his preliminary hearing would be soon, if it hadn’t happened already. I was hoping we still had him in custody. The fact that I was never called to testify at the prelim made it more likely that he was. I went back inside.
“When was this, Junie? What day?”
“Honey, I can answer that one very easily. It was August third. My birthday. Twenty-one again.”
“Congratulations. What time?”
“Well, let’s see . . . I was due to meet Jer . . . uh, my meetin’, if you get my meanin’ . . .”
“I do.”
“I was due to meet him at seven-thirty, honey, so it was little past seven. It was gettin’ dark, you know, but make no mistake here . . . I saw what I saw, honey.” She waved a boney finger in the air for emphasis.
“Alright, Junie, we believe you.”
I stood with Junie out in the back parking lot while Alex tried to talk a patrol officer into taking her to Forest Lawn in Burbank, in rush-hour traffic.
“How’d you get the eye, Junie?”
“Oh, you know, honey . . . I can be so damn clumsy . . .”
“He hit you, didn’t he? Laborteaux?”
She looked at me. “No, honey. And please . . . Junie can take care of herself. She’s a big girl.”
“I know. Take care, huh? Stay out of trouble?” I slipped her a Jackson. It was all I had.
“I will, honey.” She took the bill and slid it down the front of her dress, then walked toward the patrol car and started in with the officer.
“Honey, you know I’m goin’ to Forest Lawn Cemetery . . . this time of day, it’s best to take surface streets and hit the freeway closer to downtown . . .” The hapless patrolman rolled his eyes. “Honey, are you listenin’ to me?”
“We owe him a beer,” Alex said.
“We owe him more than that. Let’s find a little something extra for Junie, too. This was big.”
“Yeah.”
We went back inside, and stepped into the conference room for some quiet. All hell was breaking loose in the station at the moment. Happened sometimes.
“So, Chambliss is up on the street, not down in the creek.”
“Right,” I said. “He shoots down at Crane, who’s under the overhang . . .”
“Is he up close? I mean, he shoots Crane in the head, the blood goes out, toward the wall, not back . . .”
“Unless Chambliss touched him, tried to move the body . . .”
“So, how does Crane get there in the first place? How does the canoe come into play?”
“I don’t know, padna. But according to Junie, Chambliss was covered in blood. So, he takes off in his car and goes . . . where?”
“Well, he had Crane there for one of two reasons: to get something from him, or to kill him outright.”
“Okay, so if he killed him outright, he’d go where . . . home?”
“I would. I’d want to shower, get rid of the bloody clothes . . . if it was a lot of blood, like Junie said, there’d be a mess . . .” He stopped. “What?”
“The carpet at the Westchester house . . . inside Crane’s room . . . it had been shampooed.”
“Yeah, it sure as shit had. He went back to the house to look for something he didn’t find on his victim. He gets blood all over the floor . . .”
“And what . . . he shampoos the carpet without anyone else seeing him? Bullshit. I want Monroe and Chambliss in here right fucking now. They fucking lied to us.”
“Yeah. I hate when that happens. Want a warrant to search the house and the Hummer, too?”
“Yeah. That’d be nice.”
††††
I picked Karen up and we went to a dark little restaurant in the Marina. We ordered our cocktails.
“This weekend was . . .”
“Like going to Disneyland for the first time.”
“Huh,” she said. “Curious, what ride was I?”
“The one that goes up and down, up and down, up and . . .” she tossed a napkin at me. I caught it and tossed it back on the table.
“You know where I grew up, right? Disneyland was a world away, and the closest I ever came was Tinkerbell and the Castle every Sunday night on TV.”
“The Wonderful World of Disney! I watched it every week.”
“Right. Well, this weekend . . . it was like I imagined I’d feel, going to Disneyland the first time. See, not so offensive, is it?”
“I suppose not. Did you ever get to Disneyland?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I did. I was thirty years old, but I made it.”
“And what did yo
u think?”
“Uh, I’ll hold off on that for now.”
“You loved it, didn’t you?” she smiled.
I felt my face grow hot.
“You took a picture with Mickey and got black Mickey Mouse ears with John embroidered on the back. No . . . Johnny.”
I smirked, growing redder still.
“You went on The Matterhorn and Pirates of the Caribbean, and you screamed in the Haunted Mansion . . .”
“Keep it up.”
“And you sang yourself to sleep that night with ‘It’s a Small World’.”
“You’re just begging for discipline.”
“I knew it!”
“You don’ know nuttin’, lady.”
“Well, I confess I love it, too. Let’s go sometime.”
“Can I kiss you on all the dark rides?”
“Yes.” She took my hand. “I’d like that very much.”
We sipped our drinks and I looked at her like I was seeing her for the first time. She made me want to be a better man, and I didn’t know if I was ready for that yet. I didn’t hear a word she was saying because I was drowning in her. How would it be, I wondered, to have a life with this woman—to come home every night to her, to love her, to make love to her, to fight with her, to cry with her? How soon would it be before she tired of me and moved on? Would I tire of her?
“What is it, John?” she asked quietly.
“Tell me about him, the one you made the table to get over.” I didn’t have a clue where that came from. I had not planned it, and it was times like this that I usually got my nuts in a ringer. She sat back and sighed heavily.
“It’s not important.”
“Sure it is. It is to me. Come on, I want to know.”
She hesitated. I could tell she didn’t want to talk about it but I didn’t care. I wanted to know. “It started out fine and it got worse from there,” she said finally.
“And you left him?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“It just didn’t work out, John.”
“Did he hit you, cheat on you . . . what?”
She sighed. “No to the first, and . . . maybe with the second.”
“And that was why?”