In a tone that indicated I knew more than the price of having someone murdered, I added, “It has to be someone else. Someone she doesn’t know. A professional.”
Claire’s eyes flashed. “A . . . professional?”
“That’s right.”
I thought Claire might take the bait, or at least ask another question. Instead she drew in a taut breath and got to her feet.
“Thanks for coming, Sloan,” she said.
I didn’t want to leave her. There was a chance she wouldn’t call me again.
“Do you want to go somewhere else?” I asked. “Have a drink?”
She shook her head. “My father’s here. He had a heart attack. That’s why I was here. Otherwise I wouldn’t have known about Margot.”
“I see,” I said quietly. I waited a beat. “Look, if you’re father’s still in the hospital, I could meet you here tomorrow night. We could just talk.”
She seemed hesitant to accept my offer.
“It’s what friends do, Claire,” I added.
She smiled softly. “Okay. Tomorrow.”
On the way to my car, it struck me that during our discussion about Margot, her husband, women who let men get away with it, Claire had not once mentioned Simon. That didn’t matter. Claire’s failure with Margot had almost certainly got her thinking about her failure to save Melody, along with the possibility that she would also be too late to rescue Emma from the evil clutches of Simon Miller. If she kept accusing herself of these self-lacerating disappointments, she’d surely arrive at the conclusion that the time had come to act.
The next time we meet, I told myself, I’ll wear a wire.
Claire
THE NEXT MORNING I call the hospital. My father has stabilized. He is sleeping. They will let me know if his condition changes. I decide not to cancel any clients for the moment.
For the next few hours I teach one student, then another. I practice vocabulary and conjugate verbs and go through lessons prepared beforehand for scores of clients over the years.
It’s my usual routine, but nothing is the same.
Margot’s beaten body.
My inaction about Simon.
I’m genuinely frightened of what I’m thinking, of how far I might actually go to stop him.
These thoughts create an urge to see Emma, so in the afternoon I park my car across the street from her school and wait for it to let out. When it does, a stream of girls pour through the wide doors. They scatter in various directions after they pass through the gate. They are rushing to the waiting cars of their parents.
Emma is in a small knot of girls. They are all in same neat uniform, a gray skirt and white polo. She is blond, and the bright light of Los Angeles turns her hair to gold. She is laughing and tossing her head. The world is hers, as it had once been Melody’s.
I am enjoying this vision of Emma until I see Simon.
He is standing beside his car, motioning to her as she leaves the school grounds.
His smile is warm and welcoming, as always.
When Emma spots him, she quickly says goodbye to her friends and rushes toward him, happy and trusting.
Others would see a happy little girl rushing toward a beloved father.
I see Simon’s next victim.
•
Mr. Cohen is sitting alone in his yard when I pull into my drive after a day of work.
He waves at me.
I don’t want to talk to anyone, but he is a lonely man, so I walk over to him.
“How’s your father?” he asks with a hint of worry.
“Still in the hospital.”
“Will he be going home soon?”
“I don’t know.”
I notice the book on Mr. Cohen’s lap. A biography of Joan of Arc.
“A brave woman,” Mr. Cohen says.
My indifference to Joan of Arc’s courage surprises and troubles me. I realize that I am no longer capable of being engaged by anything beyond my own future action. The world has shrunk to the narrow space that separates me from Simon. I can think of nothing else. He is the furiously overheated room I can’t get out of. Even in open air I feel trapped.
“Give your father my best,” Mr. Cohen tells me.
“I will.”
I walk into my office. I don’t feel like preparing lessons. I sit behind my desk and let my gaze wander.
Eventually my attention falls on one of the prints I’ve hung across from my desk. It is the famous trompe l’oeil by Pere Borrell De Caso. It shows a young boy attempting to flee the painting’s frame. It’s called Escaping Criticism, and I’ve always found it a whimsical and uplifting work.
Now it seems like a taunt.
A cruel lie.
For there is no escape.
No escape at all.
Sloan
AS WE’D AGREED the night before, Claire was waiting for me at the same table in the hospital cafeteria.
A few minutes earlier I’d readied a voice-activated recording device. The days of people wearing dangerously bulky recorders were long past. Mine was the size of a shirt button, easily hidden by the lapel of my jacket.
When I spotted Claire in the far corner of the room, I could see that she was in the same pent-up, explosive condition she’d been in the night before.
“I went to Emma’s school today,” she said tensely when I sat down across from her. “Simon was there to pick her up.”
She took a deep breath before she added, “I can’t let him do it again, Sloan.”
Without being asked, she launched into her tale of the night Melody died. It was raining and the sea was rough.
Claire was on the deck, heading toward the cabin she shared with Simon, when she saw Melody standing by the rail.
“She looked sick,” Claire said. “I thought maybe it was the rocking of the boat. I asked her if she was okay. She didn’t answer right away. Finally she said, ‘No, Mom. I’m not okay.’ ”
Claire stared at me stonily.
“She told me that Simon was attracted to her. And it wasn’t just a matter of glances. When he hugged her, it was too hard, too long. The way he looked at her made her cringe. And once he came up behind her, pressed against her, and she’d . . . felt him.”
She shook her head.
“She told me all of this, and you know what I said to her? That I didn’t believe her. Then I went to our cabin and told Simon what Melody had said. He looked at me like I was crazy to believe anything Melody told me. He was the innocent victim of a false accusation. Melody was going through a phase. It was as simple as that.”
She regarded me without a hint of doubt as to the truth of what she said next.
“But he was the liar, not Melody. And he would have gone further. Or at least tried. He would have seduced her if he could. He may have done it before, to some other little girl. And I know he’ll do it again. Because that’s what he is. A child molester.”
It was clear by her expression and the melancholy tenor of her voice that Claire’s delusions had completely taken over. She was carved from their falsehood, a product of their sinister intrigue.
“He’ll do it again,” she repeated. “Unless I stop him.”
She took a sip of the coffee she’d been nursing before I joined her at the table. Her eyes were red-rimmed and watery. She was completely depleted, with her back to the wall.
“I guess that in the end it comes down to how far a person is willing to go,” I told her.
She nodded.
She was getting close to the edge. A few more words in this direction and I’d have her on tape discussing the murder-for-hire killing of Simon Miller. Come on now, I thought. Let’s go just a little further down this road.
I watched patiently as she turned things over in her mind. I needed her to take the next step. But she didn’t.
Instead, she lifted her head, almost proudly, like a soldier returning to the battle. “I should get back up to my father’s room,” she said.
The night before, she’d evaded any furthe
r discussion of this subject by the same means of escape, but now I was too close to carrying out my plan to release her.
“I’ll go with you,” I said quickly.
We got to our feet and a couple of minutes later entered her father’s room. Claire walked over to his bed.
She was infinitely sad.
For a moment she watched her father silently. Then she turned toward me very quickly, almost violently. “What do you think of me, Sloan?” she asked.
I was about to assure her that I respected her. That I sympathized with her. If it worked, she’d finally trust me enough to discuss murdering Simon Miller.
But a doctor opened the door of the room. “Do you have a minute, Ms. Fontaine?”
Claire followed the doctor out into the corridor, leaving me alone with the old man.
He was lying on his back. His eyes were closed, but there was a lot of movement beneath the lids. Quick darting motions, like someone looking for an exit. A few seconds later he opened his eyes and took a quick breath. “Ah!” he gasped loudly, like a man coming up for air. His eyes were aflame.
I stepped over to the bed.
He reached out in my direction, his fingers grasping. I gave him my hand. He clutched my wrist brutally. I looked toward the door of the room, hoping to see Claire come through it. When she didn’t, I returned my attention to him. “I’m here,” I told him.
At the sound of my voice, something went cold in him, as if he were a man steadying himself for a fatal move.
“You,” he snarled. “You . . .”
He jerked my arm vehemently, his fingers closed around my wrist like steel bands.
“You . . .”
He was tugging viciously, a hard downward pull, as if I were hanging above him and he was determined to pull me free of whatever I clung to.
“You . . . cunt.”
I instantly recalled Simon’s story of what had happened to Claire as a child. He had framed it as a lie, one of her delusions. Now I knew the terrible truth. Claire’s father had never stopped wanting her dead.
I pulled free of him and stepped back from the bed.
He reached for me desperately, each thrust weaker than the one before until his arms finally dropped to his sides.
After that, I retreated to the window. I was still there when Claire came back into the room.
She immediately saw the anxiety in my eyes. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah,” I answered, “I’m fine.”
But I wasn’t. Because I could still feel the iron clasp of her father’s hand, his fingers like metal teeth. Even at death’s door he was grabbing for her ankles, dragging her from the boat and into the water.
I felt a wave of horror. I had to get out of this room.
“I’ll leave you now, Claire,” I said.
She smiled. “Thanks for coming.”
As I walked to the door, she faced her father and in a tentative gesture reached out a comforting hand. I thought she was going to touch him tenderly, but as her hand got closer, it began to tremble, and it kept trembling until she drew it back and sank it into the pocket of her dress.
2.
Back at my house, I poured a drink and sat down on the sofa in the living room.
I could still feel the old man’s murderous grip.
How many years had Claire lived in dread of him, her childhood so marked by fear that even now, as a grown woman, he terrified her?
I was on my second glass when the phone rang. It was Destiny.
“Can I talk to you?” she asked. “Please, can we meet?”
She was quite agitated, and when people are strung out, they are prone to do dangerous and unpredictable things. I decided to calm her down.
“Okay, I’ll meet you at the usual place.”
An hour later I pulled into the parking lot of 24/7. Destiny came out of the restaurant and walked directly to my car. She looked shaken, distracted.
“I have to talk to you,” she said as she snatched the photograph Simon had given me from the passenger seat and slid it onto the dash, then slumped into the seat.
“What’s this all about?” I asked once she’d closed the door.
“I’m afraid of Vicki,” she said. “Because I know she’ll kill me if she finds out I’ve talked to you. She hates snitches. She gives long talks about how much she hates them.”
She was scared out of her mind.
“Please, you have to promise me that you won’t tell Vicki.”
“Vicki’s in jail at the moment,” I said. “She stabbed another woman.”
“She killed her?” Destiny asked in a tone that sounded almost hopeful, as if this was the answer to her prayers.
“No, it was only a flesh wound,” I told her.
“Then she’ll get out at some point.”
“Yes, she will.”
“I can’t let that happen.”
“What do you mean?”
“I have to make sure she stays in jail.”
“How can you do that?”
“I could make sure she’s charged with something else.”
“What?”
“Like maybe . . . farming out underage girls. Like, sex trafficking. I could tell the cops she did that. And if I did that, maybe, as a witness, I could . . . you know . . . walk away?”
“That’s possible,” I said. “But you’d better have your facts straight, Destiny.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you’d better have real evidence on Vicki. Something strong enough that you could make a deal.”
I could see that Destiny was turning this over in her mind. Finally she said, “I have enough.”
“You were involved?”
“A little, but Vicki ran things. I was just a . . .”
“A what?”
“Like . . . an assistant.”
The story she related during the next few minutes was bad even by LA standards. The house in the desert was a regular meeting place for Vicki and her numerous clients. It had been a makeshift brothel for years. Recently the clientele had become more specialized, with a taste for younger girls. Often the girls were foreign, with no English. They were taken to the house, used, then returned to their keepers. Others were local, recruited from the streets, then returned to them.
“The girls were always changing,” she said. “Sometimes they’d just show up once.”
Destiny suspected that some of the girls lived on the road, kept in vans that moved from city to city. It might have gone on forever, but the girl in the water had complicated things, and so Vicki had shut the operation down.
“Maybe it’ll start up again once things cool off,” Destiny added. “But I won’t have anything to do with it, I swear.”
Destiny’s newfound virtue didn’t interest me.
“Keep going,” I said.
She did. As she continued to talk, more details about how things operated at what she suddenly called “Lolitaville” came to light.
“We’d go with a few of them,” Destiny said. “Once we got there, Vicki would take the first girl inside the house.”
“Where were you?”
“I stayed in the van with the other girls, keeping an eye on them. Like a guard, you might say. But I didn’t hit them. I never hit any of them.”
Destiny clearly considered this proof of her good character.
“You didn’t need to do that, really,” she added. “Because once they were in the van, they couldn’t put up much of a fight.”
“Why not?”
“Because before we left LA, Vicki drugged them,” Destiny answered. “Not heavy stuff, though. Vicki didn’t want them to be zombies. She wanted them easy to handle. No yelling. No crying. No punching us or trying to run off. They had to be lively enough to please her customers. I mean, what’s the point, if they’re just dead weight?”
Once again I kept it low-key, as if I were simply evaluating the quality of her testimony.
“Nothing more than drugs?” I asked.
“That’s all she used to control them?”
“No, she handcuffed them,” Destiny answered. “The ones she left inside, I mean. Then she’d come out and get the next one.”
“You never went inside?”
Destiny shook her head. “I was just a guard.”
From the way she said this, you’d have thought she worked in security at a department store.
“After we got them all inside, men would show up,” she continued. “They’d choose the girl they liked, do what they wanted with her, then stroll back to their cars and take off back to LA or wherever they’d come from.” She took out a cigarette and lit it. “Vicki had a real strict schedule worked out. A guy was on the clock from the minute he showed up. Vicki, she didn’t give an extra second. When someone’s time was up, his time was up, and off he’d go.”
She slapped her hands together.
“Over and out, know what I mean?”
“What happened to the girls after that?”
“When it was over, I’d take them back to the van,” Destiny answered. “I’d talk nice to them. Tell them everything was fine. Give them something to eat and drink.”
She seemed to think her simple helpfulness made her a better person.
“How long did you do this?” I asked.
“Until that girl showed up in the water. I figured Vicki was responsible, and I said to myself, Don’t ever have anything else to do with her.”
“Did Vicki have something to do with that girl’s death?”
Destiny looked at me meaningfully. “Vicki could do anything. And painting that picture on the wall near McDuffy’s, where anybody could see it—Vicki wouldn’t like that.”
She shrugged.
“I’m not saying Vicki killed her. Or had her killed. But with Vicki, you never know.”
When I had no more questions, she slapped her hands together almost playfully. “I guess that’s it,” she said. “That’s what I’ve got. It’s a lot, right?”
“Yes, but maybe not enough.”
She was surprised to hear this.
“They’ll need names, Destiny,” I told her.
She thought this requirement over before making her decision. “I guess I could do that,” she said finally. She smiled nervously. “Can you help me?” she asked. “You must know people.”
“I’ll do the best I can,” I assured her.
An Inconvenient Woman Page 18
