An Inconvenient Woman

by An Inconvenient Woman (retail) (epub)

  Melody once had no such doubt.

  As I drive away, I realize the extent to which a dream of happiness can motivate me.

  I think of Melody.

  She is four years old. We are having a picnic in Descanso Park. Melody takes a leaf, folds it delicately into her hair, then bends over one of the park’s glassy ponds to catch a glimpse of herself in the water.

  She lies in Angelus Rosedale Cemetery now. Unlike some LA cemeteries, this one is not dotted with the star-studded dead. No Marilyn Monroes or Elizabeth Taylors here, nor tourists seeking famous graves.

  Melody’s stone is as modest as the ones around it. Her name is engraved on it, along with the dates that encompassed her brief life. There is a small bench a few feet from where she rests. I come here once a month, and each time I bring a letter I’ve written to her. I read it silently, merely thinking the words. To anyone who might come by, I’m simply a woman sitting alone, reading to herself. But the words are for my daughter.

  Dear Melody:

  I remember that when you were afraid, you always wanted to hold my hand. Now I want to hold yours. I often imagine your eyes. I want to see them sparkling with life. With curiosity. I have beautiful memories of you talking with me, laughing with me, confiding in me. Even now I see you everywhere. In the morning, at first light. During the day, when I see other girls. At night, when I turn off the lamp. I want you to know that not a moment goes by when I’m not aware of the life you might have had and would still be having.

  I am sorry.

  Mom

  Sloan

  THE COP IN ME.

  What was it that still lingered with me from my days with the LAPD?

  Maybe it was nothing more than the feeling that evil people should pay for the evil things they do.

  You can leave the job, put your badge in a drawer and close it, but you can’t put away the idea that bad people shouldn’t just walk away from the pain they cause.

  Remember Satan’s feather.

  It was only a small step from recalling my father’s admonition to thinking about Vicki Page. If Destiny had told the truth, then a brothel that specialized in underage girls had been operating for years under her direction. I couldn’t stand the thought of doing nothing with the information I’d gotten from Destiny.

  I made a call to Candace. She had the necessary connections.

  “What do you know about Vicki Page?” I asked.

  She recognized the name. Everyone in the LAPD knew Vicki. She was a criminal legend in the department.

  “Just that she’s in the LAPD jail at the moment,” she said. “She stabbed a woman on Venice Beach.”

  “Have you ever heard that she ran a brothel somewhere out in the desert? For men who are into young girls.”

  “No.”

  “Nothing at all?”

  “I know she’s been arrested for procurement, but that’s ancient history. She’s into more sophisticated stuff now. Identity theft, that sort of thing. Nothing about a brothel for pedophiles. Where’d you hear about this?”

  “From someone I know who says she took the girl they found off Santa Monica Pier to Vicki and then went with both of them out to this place in the desert.”

  “Can you trust this someone?”

  “I’m not sure. That’s why I’d like to talk to Vicki. Can you get me in to see her?”

  “You’re not a cop anymore, Sloan,” Candace reminded me.

  “Part of me is.”

  Candace’s tone went somber. “I see.”

  “Can you help me?”

  “You know Vicki. She’ll want something in return.”

  “What can I offer her?”

  “You can tell her that if she talks to you, you’ll have a word with me,” Candace said. “And I’ll put in a good word with someone else.” She laughed. “They always take that bait.”

  She said she’d call the powers that be at the jail, tell them that I wanted to see Vicki and make the offer.

  Fifteen minutes later she got back to me.

  “Vicki can’t wait to see her old friend Detective Wilson,” Candace said jokingly. “She’s hoping for a real love fest.” She laughed. “Actually she didn’t want to talk to you at all, but she got the message, so she’s willing. But don’t expect much. She’s a hard-ass.”

  That was true.

  I’d dealt with Vicki before. None of those encounters had been pleasant. She’d been a hooker for a while but had long ago graduated to being a one-woman criminal enterprise. After that she’d run loan sharking operations, peddled prescription drugs, dabbled in identity theft, and subcontracted as a procurer for men with kinky sexual tastes. She was one of those people who never got up in the morning with the idea of making an honest living.

  Later that morning I was waiting for her as she walked nonchalantly into one of the interrogation rooms at the jail, wearing a bright orange jumpsuit.

  “Well, here she is,” she said sarcastically. “Sloan Wilson, girl detective.”

  She feigned sudden surprise.

  “Whoa. I forgot. You’re not a cop anymore.”

  She dropped into a chair and stared at me coldly. “Don’t you look professional, all dolled up in your neat pantsuit.”

  I looked her up and down. “Orange is definitely your color, Vicki. My guess is you’ll be wearing it for a long time.”

  Vicki smirked. “Beats copper blue.”

  That was Vicki to a T. Being hostile to anyone who wasn’t as worthless as herself was all she knew of pride or self-respect.

  “I hear you know something about the girl they found floating near the pier a few days ago.” I opened the folder I’d brought and drew out a brief newspaper clipping about the discovery of the body of an unidentified girl off Santa Monica Pier.

  Vicki gave it an indifferent glance, then turned it facedown on the table. “I don’t read the paper unless I’m mentioned in it.”

  “You have no idea who this girl might be?”

  “Let me guess. Jane Doe Two Million?”

  She sat back in her chair and folded her arms over her chest. She looked like the queen of criminals sitting on her throne.

  “I shouldn’t be in this shithole,” she said in a way that made it clear that as far as she was concerned, the subject of the drowned girl was now closed. “I didn’t stab that bitch for nothing. She got what was coming to her. She started it. She’s the one who should be in this fucking jail.”

  She said this in an aggrieved tone, like an honest businesswoman burdened by unjust competition. That was what my father had hated about people like Vicki. They all believed they were somehow the wounded party.

  Vicki laughed. “You must be doing good, though. Most cops that leave the job end up night watchmen in warehouses or providing security for big-shot weddings. That’s what cops do, right? When they’re not on the job anymore. Ain’t that what your dear old daddy did when he left off being a real cop?”

  “What my father did is no concern of yours,” I told her sternly.

  Vicki sat back with a sneer. “Well, all dressed up like you are, I figure you must have found something better.”

  “I do private work,” I told her. “That’s all you need to know.”

  Vicki released a bored sigh. “What do you want . . . Detective?” she asked.

  “The girl in the newspaper. You farmed her out to a bunch of creeps.”

  “Where did you hear that?”

  “From one of your girls.”

  Vicki grinned confidently. “My ‘girls,’ as you put it, don’t rat on me.”

  “One of them did. She says you specialize in underage girls.”

  Vicki’s expression turned lethal.

  “You take them to a house in the desert,” I added. “Someplace in the middle of nowhere.”

  Vicki stared at me with a brittle invulnerability. “What do you care? You’re not a cop anymore. It’s none of your business what I do.”

  She leaned forward and something poisonous came into he
r eyes.

  “Listen up,” she said sharply. “If you keep sniffing around with that cop nose of yours, you’re going to get hurt real bad.”

  She looked at me as if she were suddenly in charge.

  “I know plenty . . . Detective. Plenty you don’t want to hear, or have anyone else hear.”

  I knew what she was getting at. She was telling me that she had something on me from my days with the LAPD, that I was corrupt and that she knew it. Since everyone was on the take in one way or another, I had to have been dirty, too. She didn’t need to be specific. I would get the message.

  But I’d never taken a bribe or done an inappropriate favor. I had nothing to fear from her.

  I called her bluff.

  “You’re full of shit,” I said.

  She stood her ground, and added a twisted little smile.

  “I’m telling you to forget about that girl. That house in the desert. Along with anything else that snitch told you. Back away, or you’ll be sorry.”

  She made me sick.

  I got up and headed out of the room.

  “You’re going down, Sloan,” Vicki called when I reached the door.

  I looked at her.

  “No, Vicki. You are.”

  I walked out of the building and had nearly reached my car when I heard a voice behind me.

  “How’s the incorruptible Detective Wilson?”

  I turned to see a local drug dealer named Darrell Smithers, a psychopathic thug whose competition was often found in the trunks of stolen cars.

  “You are looking fine, mama,” Smithers said. “Pity you’re wasting all that good stuff.”

  It was impossible to know just how much damage he had done during the course of his worthless life. How many people he’d maimed or murdered. How many children had been shot in the drive-bys he’d ordered. He was a poisonous little snake who’d slither through Los Angeles for as long as he drew breath.

  His gaze moved up and down my body. “Mighty good stuff.”

  He was all smiles and relaxation. He could wink at me, leer at me, and make suggestive remarks. There was nothing I could do. He knew this, and relied upon it to protect himself from the anger he provoked.

  “Mighty fine,” he repeated in a lascivious tone.

  When I reached for the door handle of my car, he laughed. “You should come home with me, girl,” he said in a mocking voice. “You should come home to Daddy.”

  The impulse that swept over me was so strong it all but lifted me into the air. I wanted to take him by the throat and squeeze until he turned blue, watch his mouth foam until he died like a dog on the pavement.

  Instead I got into my car and drove to my office.

  Once there, I called Destiny.

  “I want to find the house where you took the girl,” I told her.

  Destiny caught her breath.

  “I don’t know where it is,” she said.

  “You know the general area. We’ll look until we find it.”

  She knew I wasn’t going to let this go. “I could try, I guess,” she said weakly. “But what’s it got to do with—”

  I cut her off.

  “What time are you off today?”

  “Four this afternoon.”

  “I’ll be there.”

  •

  Two hours later she came out of 24/7, craning her neck, looking for my car. When she saw it, she walked toward me quickly and got in.

  “I may not be able to find it,” she said.

  “You’ll find it,” I told her. “Because if you don’t, I’ll tell Vicki Page you snitched on her.”

  Destiny froze.

  “We both know what’ll happen to you after that,” I said.

  She nodded meekly.

  “I’ll show you where it is.”

  She directed me to the 10-E out of Los Angeles. An hour later we nosed into the desert. There were a few small dusty crossroads with a gas station and what amounted to a general store, but it was mostly scrub brush, rock, and sand. I spotted a coyote in the distance. It was scrawny and probably covered in vermin. It looked like the land around it, thirsty and deprived.

  “Take a right here,” she said after we’d driven into the desert for another half hour.

  I turned onto a weedy road. Pale green cacti rose into the bleached air. I caught sight of a few rolling balls of desiccated brush. No one lived out this way anymore, but there were a couple of tumbledown shacks, long abandoned. As we drove, the road steadily narrowed until it became little more than two bone-dry ruts across the desert floor.

  At last it came to an end at the dilapidated gate of a farmhouse.

  “That’s it,” Destiny said.

  I gazed silently at the house. It was a wreck. Clearly no one had lived in it for years. But what got my attention in that jumble of wood and cracked glass was that the windows were black and the door was red.

  “Is this . . . McDuffy’s?”

  “Yes,” Destiny answered.

  She looked at me pointedly.

  “Vicki saw it,” she said. “She thought it was the girl’s way of trying to tell people about what had happened to her.”

  The grim implication was obvious.

  “Did Vicki have her killed?” I asked.

  Destiny looked both sad for the girl and frightened for herself.

  “I don’t know. Really. I don’t know.”

  We got out of the car and walked to the house. Just to be safe, I knocked, then, when there was no sign of anyone inside, I tried the door. It wasn’t locked.

  The front room had been stripped of anything that might leave a trace of who’d been here or for what reason. Everything had been cleaned thoroughly, every piece of furniture removed. There’d be no fingerprints here. No DNA. It was as if the whole house had just descended from the big sky above, had never felt a human touch.

  Staring at this room, I knew that there’d be no sign of where the girl in the water had lain, drugged and insensible, waiting to be raped. All evidence of her ordeal had been wiped away as completely as her body had been washed in the sea.

  I couldn’t help but wonder if I might have saved her, along with others Vicki had brought here, if I’d stayed a cop.

  I remembered the morning I’d decided to leave the LAPD. I’d been at my desk for only a few minutes when a call came in.

  “It’s a family thing, Sloan,” the dispatcher said gravely.

  Family things always got to me, particularly the cruelest domestics, the ones that turned dark and bloody.

  “Wife and two kids,” the dispatcher added. “Over on Sepulveda.”

  I recognized the house the minute we pulled up to it. I’d been called there several times. Always by neighbors who’d heard a woman screaming, children crying.

  There were squad cars everywhere, along with a couple of ambulances waiting to take the bodies away. There were three of them. A woman facedown on the kitchen floor. A girl around nine years old on the living room sofa. Another, two years younger, in the hallway. The woman and one of the girls had been shot in the back of the head. The other daughter, the older one, had been shot in the throat and the chest.

  “I’ve been here a few times,” I told one of the other detectives. “The name’s Bennett, right?”

  “That’s right. They’re holding him in the backyard.”

  Bennett stood surrounded by a few cops, some in uniform, some in plain clothes. His hands were cuffed behind him. He was dressed in black trousers and a white sleeveless T-shirt. His face was red and his eyes were watery.

  When he saw me, there was a glimmer of recognition.

  “ Annie saw it coming,” he said to no cop in particular. “The others, it was in the back. They didn’t know what hit them. But Annie saw me with the gun and just stood there. Like she didn’t get it. Maybe it was a joke. Like it couldn’t be real.” He peered about wonderingly. “She just stood there. ‘Dad?’ she said. ‘Dad?’ ”

  He rambled on, sometimes stopping for a teary interval. As
he talked, I recalled the times I’d been here. The cringing of the wife. The terror in the faces of the little girls who clung to her legs. I knew the world they’d cowered in.

  Now Bennett’s tale careened into self-pity.

  It was always the same story. I’d heard it a thousand times.

  He was under a lot of pressure, poor thing.

  His wife was always complaining and the girls were always fighting.

  How much of this was a man supposed to take?

  Anybody can snap, right?

  It turned my stomach.

  I wanted to bring him to his knees, make him beg for his life: This is how it feels to be terrorized.

  But everything said, Go by the rules.

  I walked back into the house, stood in the hallway, and tried to get a grip. I could feel a rattling inside me, like a house rocked by wind, small pieces coming loose, flying away. I had to gather them back in.

  For God’s sake, calm down, I told myself.

  That had been the moment when I’d known I had to leave the job.

  Now I felt my old career summon me back.

  I wanted to bring Vicki Page down, and seized by that passion, I thought of all the times my father must have felt the same way. That was what my mother’s denunciation and later suicide had finally done to him. They had denied him his calling, separated him from all the good he might have done.

  My old resentment of my mother seized me.

  I all but vibrated with a ferocious need to make her pay.

  She was well beyond my reach, however. Claire Fontaine came into my sights instead. It was as if they’d merged, become inseparable.

  I knew that my first strategy for silencing Claire had failed. Destiny had found nothing I could use against Claire.

  As I drove back to LA, with Destiny sitting silently beside me, I searched for a scheme that would shut Claire down once and for all.

  Since Destiny hadn’t gotten anything on Claire, the new strategy couldn’t rely on dredging up some shameful aspect of her past.

  The next device had to come entirely out of left field.

  I had to think outside the usual sin-eater box, come up with something bold and clever and totally unexpected, a twist in the story that would completely surprise Claire, change any notion she’d earlier had of what was actually going on and at the same time draw her yet more firmly under my control.