An Inconvenient Woman

by An Inconvenient Woman (retail) (epub)

  I pick up my phone, tap out the number, and wait.

  “Ray?” I say when he answers.

  “Yes.”

  “Ray . . . I . . .”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I . . . I . . .” My voice breaks. I can’t go on.

  “I’ll be right over,” Ray tells me.

  He arrives a few minutes later.

  “What happened?” he asks as I usher him into the house.

  I tell him about Dominic, about the flowers from Mehdi, even about the Yelp review.

  He listens carefully as the two of us sit in the living room of my house.

  My voice is steady, but my nerves are clanging.

  I know I sound as if I’m overreacting, and for that reason I have no idea how he may respond to the odd things I’m telling him.

  When I’m done, he remains quiet for a brief interval before he asks, “You didn’t think it was any of those people who did these things, right? You thought it was someone else?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who?”

  I’ve gone as far as I’d intended to go in my story. “I don’t want to say more,” I answer.

  Ray looks at me strangely. “Why not?”

  “Because you may think I’m crazy.”

  He smiles. “You don’t seem crazy to me.”

  He looks at me determinedly.

  “Who, Claire?”

  I hesitate, though I know the time has come.

  “Simon,” I answer. “Simon Miller.”

  Ray obviously recognizes the name.

  “We were married for five years,” I add.

  He doesn’t ask any more questions.

  I know I can stop now. I don’t have to reveal anything more about myself. That’s when I know that the author I read so long ago was right.

  The essence of falling in love really is jeopardy.

  And so I take a chance.

  “Simon is . . . a very bad man,” I begin.

  Then I tell him everything.

  Sloan

  I CONTINUED TO believe that the best way to free Simon of Claire’s accusations was for Claire to relent. She had to recognize the damage she was doing. Or had already done.

  At some point while thinking this through, I remembered the one time my father had stopped my mother in her tracks. Before then, he’d taken her behavior in his stride. But suddenly he’d wheeled around, glared at her coldly, and said, “If you’re such a great mother, where’s Layla?”

  Layla.

  The child she’d had before meeting my father, a little girl she’d simply dropped off at her grandmother’s house in Memphis and never seen again.

  At the mention of Layla, my mother had gone completely silent, then turned away and headed into the bedroom, where she’d stayed until morning.

  What had been my father’s single effective weapon against her?

  Shame.

  I wondered if the same tactic might work with Claire as well.

  To answer that question, I needed to know more about her.

  Private stuff I could use to get her off Miller’s back.

  I’d interviewed Simon Miller, watched his video, searched the public records, read the police reports, talked to Candace. I’d combed the Internet in search of some key to Claire. I’d found nothing of importance.

  Other than Claire herself, I had only one source of information left: Destiny. I waited until around ten o’clock before I called her.

  “Twenty-four seven,” a man’s voice answered.

  “Is Destiny there?” I asked.

  I heard the man call her to the phone.

  “Coming,” she shouted back.

  She sounded stressed out, wound tight.

  “I’m beat,” she said to someone as she took the phone, “It’s Destiny, who’s this?”

  “It’s Julie Cooper.”

  Destiny instantly went on guard.

  “Oh,” she said cautiously. “Hi.”

  I added a touch of urgency to my approach.

  “I think we should talk again.”

  “What about?”

  I heard worry in her voice, and worked it with a vague bluff.

  “I think you know.”

  The silence at the other end of the line told me that Destiny had something to hide. I remembered the strained look in her face when I’d mentioned Vicki Page, so I opened that door first.

  “Vicki,” I said. “Vicki Page.”

  Destiny’s voice went dark. “I can’t talk about her.”

  The change of tone told me that she’d had more than a casual relationship with Vicki.

  I used the old ploy of suggesting that the snitch had been snitched on. “What if I were to tell you that she’s talking about you?” I asked.

  “To who?”

  When I didn’t answer, there was a tense pause before she added, “To the cops?”

  I waited.

  “Are you a cop?” Destiny asked.

  “No, I’m not.”

  “So why do you want to know about Vicki?”

  “Let’s just say I’m looking to corroborate her story.”

  “Vicki’s story . . . about me?”

  Silence did the trick again.

  “Vicki gave me up?” Destiny asked.

  Once again I held fire.

  “She gave you stuff about me?”

  Destiny’s questions told me all I needed to know: Destiny had done something for which she could be ratted on by Vicki Page. In her mind, Vicki had already thrown her under the bus. Now she could do the same to Vicki. Such was life in the marginal world they both inhabited. No one was ever more important than yourself. You’d be a fool to think any other way. A philosophy of life sin eaters easily leverage to their advantage.

  Which was exactly what I intended to do.

  “When’s your next break?” I asked.

  “Three o’clock.”

  “I’ll be waiting in the parking lot. Look for a dark blue Maxima.”

  “Okay,” Destiny said. “But you got to promise me you’re not a cop.”

  “I told you that.”

  “Yeah . . . but.”

  “Destiny, if I were a cop, I’d tell you.”

  “Okay,” Destiny said. “We can talk.”

  I knew she was already trying to figure out exactly what Vicki Page had told me. More important, she was working on how to get herself out of the fix she was in. Making a list of the people she’d be willing to betray.

  There was only one name I wanted to be on it.

  Claire Fontaine.

  •

  Five hours later, Destiny walked toward my car. She looked smaller and more vulnerable than before, like a boxer facing an opponent twice her size. The only question in her mind was how quickly she could end the fight and crawl out of the ring.

  “Hi,” she said weakly as she got into my car.

  I went straight to the point.

  “Destiny, you need to come clean,” I told her in a voice I made as sisterly as possible.

  Destiny looked at me as if my opinion of her mattered more than that of anyone she’d ever known.

  “I’m not a bad person,” she said meekly. “I’m really not.”

  “I know you’re not. But I have to trust my sources, Destiny. Their background. What they’ve done. Make sure they’re reliable. I don’t want anything to pop up that I should have known about. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Okay,” Destiny murmured.

  She was primed to answer any question I might ask. I started probing.

  “You worked for Vicki Page, correct?”

  She nodded halfheartedly.

  “Not for long, though,” she said. “And I was never one of her girls. I just helped her out a little.”

  “What did you do?”

  She looked at me hesitantly.

  “You won’t tell the cops, will you?”

  “No.”

  “Or Claire?”

  “I won’t tell anyone,” I assured
her. “This is strictly off the record. Otherwise I’d be taking notes on our conversation. And as you can see, I’m not doing that.”

  She smiled slightly. “Yeah, sure. You have to trust your sources.”

  She sounded like a journalist well aware of the rules of her profession.

  I took this occasion of imagined collegiality to press ahead.

  “If you weren’t one of Vicki’s girls, what did you do for her?”

  “I introduced her to other girls.”

  I played a hunch and raised the stakes. “Was the girl off the pier one of them?”

  “Yes.”

  This question put Destiny on edge. She needed a little breathing space. I gave it by changing direction.

  “What’s in your background, Destiny? Anything . . . criminal?”

  “Nothing much. Okay, arrested a couple of times, but not bad stuff.”

  She made this seem like a blameless life.

  “It’s not like I killed somebody or something,” she added.

  I didn’t care about her past offenses. Asking about them was just a way of luring her toward me, making her feel I was her confidante.

  “No, not bad at all,” I said lightly.

  She smiled.

  I acted as if that’s all I’d come for and I was now satisfied that Destiny was a “reliable source.”

  “Thanks for being honest with me,” I added in a way designed to make her think that I now trusted her completely.

  She immediately relaxed. “That’s it?”

  “Yeah,” I said.

  I offered her Julie Cooper’s big bright smile.

  “That wasn’t hard, was it?” I asked cheerfully.

  “I guess not,” Destiny answered.

  We chatted about her workday for a few minutes. I let her complain about her job before circling back to Vicki. She was off her guard now because she thought I’d already gotten what I’d come for. Circling back wouldn’t bother her at all. She probably wouldn’t even notice.

  “By the way,” I began casually, “what made you think the girl on the pier would be good for Vicki?”

  I made it sound like procuring a girl for Vicki Page was no more serious than choosing a kitten for a friend.

  “I told her she was young and pretty and that she never talked, that I’d never heard her say a word. Vicki said, ‘Yeah, good, guys like that type.’ ”

  “Vicki thought she was . . . good material?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then what?”

  “She set it up.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “She set it up for me to bring the girl to her. So she could take a look at her.”

  “Where did you take her?”

  “Vicki’s house. I sort of made friends with the girl. I told her I had another friend. Someone she’d probably like.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I took her to Vicki’s place. Once we got there, Vicki gave her some pie. Apple pie, I think. Then she took her into another room. When they came out again, the girl didn’t know much of anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Vicki shot her up.”

  “Drugged her?”

  “Yeah. She did it before we left LA. By the time we got to this other place, the girl was out of it.”

  An older part of me suddenly kicked in. The part that had once been a cop.

  I suddenly remembered that on the day I started at the academy, my father told me a story about how when Satan was booted out of heaven, he had fallen and fallen. But a feather had dropped from him before he went over the edge of Paradise, and this one part of him remained in heaven. “Even if you fall, Sloan,” he said to me, “always remember that feather, and try to get back to it.”

  “Where is this other place?” I asked.

  “Out in the desert somewhere. The middle of nowhere. It took us about an hour to get there. Maybe more.”

  “What happened when you got to this house?”

  “We waited in the car. The girl was in the back seat. Out of it. That’s the way some of Vicki’s customers like to have them. Knocked out. So they don’t remember them.”

  “What happened next?”

  “Vicki’s customers showed up. She took the girl inside. About an hour later she brought the girl back to the car. She was still out of it. We took her back to Venice Beach. The next thing I heard she was in the water.”

  “How long after she was with Vicki did she end up dead?”

  “Not long. A few days.”

  She shrugged.

  “She was a one-shot wonder, that girl. That’s what Vicki called her.”

  I wasn’t sure how much of Destiny’s story was true. I probed it here and there, looking for holes, but she stuck to her tale. I could have grilled her for another hour, but what would have been the point? Even the parts she’d made up would have hardened in her mind.

  I had one more trick to play.

  “The problem is the girl they found off the pier looks very young,” I said, as if my sympathies were entirely with Destiny. “Early teens, probably.”

  Destiny was now wary, but she kept quiet.

  “That would make you a child-sex trafficker,” I added in a tone that made it clear I was really sorry that Destiny had gotten herself into such a serious situation. “You’d be looking at twenty years.”

  I made it sound as if I found this quite unjust, given that Destiny had fallen into this trap.

  “Twenty years?” Destiny asked. “Just for . . . I mean, I didn’t . . .”

  “I know,” I told her. “It’s Vicki who should take the rap. Unfortunately, you’re in it, too.”

  She was trapped now.

  The moment had come to seal the deal.

  “Maybe I can help you,” I said.

  For effect, I let a beat go by before I added, “Because I’m not a writer.”

  Destiny’s eyes flashed. “You’re a cop! I knew it!”

  “I was a cop at one time,” I admitted. “But not anymore.”

  Destiny stared at me uncomprehendingly.

  “I’m what they call a sin eater, a fixer. I help people out of the difficult situations they get themselves into.”

  Destiny remained bewildered. She knew the game had changed, but she didn’t know in what way.

  “Do you and Claire share things?” I asked. “You know what I mean. You tell her a secret. She tells you a secret. That sort of thing.”

  Destiny’s eyes widened in stunned recognition.

  “Are you helping somebody with Claire?” she asked.

  “It’s better if you don’t ask too many questions,” I said. “It’s safer just to answer mine.”

  I waited a beat, then repeated the question.

  “Do you and Claire share things about your lives?” I asked emphatically. “Details. Intimacies.”

  I looked her dead in the eye. “Yes or no?”

  “Yeah. It’s supposed to help us get close. Sharing stuff.”

  “Does Claire ever talk about her daughter?”

  “Yeah, she’s talked about her. She drowned. She feels guilty about it.”

  “Why does she feel guilty?”

  “Because they had words the night she drowned.”

  “Did she tell you any of these words?”

  “Just that they were bad,” Destiny answered. “And Claire never got to take them back or say she was sorry.”

  I remained silent, and during that interval I saw that Destiny had picked up the scent and was now enjoying herself.

  “A sin eater,” she said, almost excitedly. “Wow.”

  She was clearly intrigued by the unexpected turn her story had taken. She looked like a girl who’d just seen the first episode of a show she really liked and was impatient for the next one.

  “I could help you,” she added. “With Claire, I mean. Whatever you need to find out. Like your partner, you know? Your sidekick.”

  Her eyes had a malignant sparkle.

  �
�I can get her to talk. I know I can. What do you want to know?”

  There was a delicious relish in her manner. Life was just a dirty game to Destiny, and it didn’t matter how you won.

  “Really,” she told me assuredly. “I know how to make her talk.”

  When I looked at her doubtfully, she took it as a challenge and reached for her phone.

  “I’ll prove it to you,” she said almost gleefully.

  She tapped the speakerphone.

  “Listen,” she said, then dialed Claire’s number.

  Claire picked up immediately. “Hi,” she said.

  Destiny winked at me.

  “It’s Destiny,” she said in a voice that made her sound broken and in need of help. “I’m not having a good day, Claire.”

  “What’s happening?” Claire asked.

  “Everything. It’s like everything is against me. Ganging up, you know? And there’s no way out.” She added a tremble to her voice. “Except to just ditch it all. Like, why bother?” She acted as if she were fighting back tears. “I’ve been trying, Claire. I’ve been trying to do better. Stay off drugs. Keep my job. But it’s hard when you’re all alone, you know?”

  Claire sounded worried.

  “Destiny, where are you?”

  “It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.”

  “No, Destiny,” Claire said urgently. “Don’t think that way.”

  “I can’t help it, Claire.”

  “Are you at home? I’ll be right there.”

  “No, no,” Destiny blurted. “I’m at work. I’ll go home at the end of my shift.”

  “When does your shift end?”

  “At six.”

  “Okay, I’ll meet you at your apartment,” Claire said.

  “You don’t have to do that. I’m not worth it.”

  Destiny’s tone took on the confused desperation of a lost child.

  “You’re all I have, Claire,” she said.

  When she hung up, she looked at me and smiled.

  “Claire’s in the palm of my hand now,” she said.

  She pocketed her phone with a self-satisfied flourish.

  “She’ll be all warm and fuzzy when I see her,” she added proudly.

  She was grinning happily, pleased with having manipulated Claire so easily.

  “She’ll open up to me.”

  She was confident she’d escaped another trap.

  “What do you want to know?” she asked.

  “Have her talk about her last conversation with Melody on the boat.”