“Not in so many words,” Pammy said.
Kelly blew out a puff of air, a sound of disgust. “Well, you can tell my mother that I’m just fine, and she doesn’t need to worry about me. I’m following the rules. And you can say that in as many words as you want.”
She started to close the door, but Pammy slid the folder in the small opening between the door frame and the door.
“Wait,” Pammy said. “Just give me five minutes.”
“No,” Kelly said. “And get that thing out of my door.”
Pammy didn’t move the folder but she did look both ways down the hall. “Is anyone nearby?”
“How the hell would I know?” Kelly asked.
“Because, Kelly,” Pammy said. “I want to talk about March.”
Kelly stepped away from the door as if Pammy had reached inside and hit her. The door inched open, since Kelly’s hand no longer held it in place, revealing Kelly herself.
She was pale, with deep shadows under her eyes. She was too thin and her dark hair hung lankly around her face.
The room smelled of unwashed sheets and barely clean girl.
Pammy had seen this before. Too many times, in fact.
“May I come in?” she asked, not wanting to violate Kelly’s privacy any more than she already had.
Kelly waved a hand. It didn’t quite beckon Pammy inside, and it didn’t indicate she should leave either. The confusion in the gesture probably mirrored the confusion inside Kelly.
Pammy had to tread carefully. Kelly was not strong, even though her voice had been. And getting her some help was much more important than finding out information on a case no one had asked Pammy, Val, and Eagle to solve.
Pammy took a tentative step inside. Kelly glared at her, then whirled and walked to the unmade bed. She sat down with a heavy thump.
Very slowly, Pammy eased the door closed, giving Kelly every chance to change her mind. Kelly just watched her, saying nothing.
Once the door snicked shut, Pammy walked to the desk, pulled back the blond wood chair, and turned it toward Kelly before sitting down.
A breeze came through the double-hung window, smelling faintly of eucalyptus. The breeze probably kept the stench in the room from being overwhelming, particularly since the garbage can under the desk was filled with banana peels, apple cores, and bread crusts.
Kelly didn’t say a word. She waited.
Pammy had never had to do all of the heavy lifting in one of these conversations before. She wasn’t exactly sure where to begin.
She put the folder on her lap.
“I…know about your trip to San Francisco General,” Pammy said.
Kelly closed her eyes.
“I know how badly you were hurt.”
Kelly was sitting so still she looked like the statue of a girl. She hadn’t opened her eyes.
“I teach classes, some of them connected to the university,” Pammy said. “I own a gym for women only called A Gym of Her Own. One of the classes is self-defense—”
“My mother sent you?” Kelly’s eyes had flown open as she spoke, her face suddenly beet-red. “My mother?”
“I didn’t say that exactly—”
“Fucking hypocritical bitch,” Kelly said.
Pammy’s breath caught. She hadn’t expected name-calling from Kelly—at least, not so soon.
But Kelly didn’t stop. She said, “My mother sent you? That’s so rich it’s pathetic.”
Apparently the fucking hypocritical bitch wasn’t Pammy. It was Kelly’s mother. Pammy stiffened, not sure what she had stumbled into.
“Did my mother also tell you that she hired the son of a bitch? She’s the one who sicced him on me. Her and my dad. God.” Kelly pounded the mattress with one hand, but the rest of her body didn’t move at all. “And now she wants me to take a defense class? So that I can defend myself against who? Is she sending another asshole my way? Is she going to let someone nearly kill me again? I’m doing exactly what she wants now. I can’t even leave this room, most of the time, but somehow I drag myself to class. And my mother wants me to go learn how to protect myself from the people she hires to force me to do what she wants? I suppose she told you that my father hired him. That this is all my father’s fault. Didn’t she?”
Pammy was trying to follow the torrent of words. They had shocked her to her core. They weren’t at all what she had expected.
“Didn’t she?” Kelly leaned forward, both hands fists now, both hands resting on the mattress as if she could launch herself off of it, using just the strength of her arms.
Pammy had screwed this up worse than she had ever thought possible.
“No, that’s not what—”
“Tell my mother,” Kelly said, “I can take care of myself, thank you. Now get the hell out of my room.”
Pammy didn’t move. It took all of her strength to remain in place. Her face was probably as red as Kelly’s.
“Okay,” Pammy said, working very hard to keep her own voice calm. “Let me be clear. I didn’t speak to your parents.”
“You said—”
“No,” Pammy said. “I implied. A friend of mine did talk to your mother. Your mother wouldn’t say where you were or what you were doing. I just—”
The color drained from Kelly’s face. Pammy could feel Kelly switch from anger to fear as if it were a live thing.
“You lied?”
“Yes,” Pammy said.
“What the hell do you want? I’m not taking some stupid class. I’m not giving you money for anything,” Kelly said.
“I understand,” Pammy said. “I screwed this up. I’m sorry.”
“Then get out,” Kelly said.
Pammy shook her head. “I wanted to talk to you in private. I need to talk to you, because I need your help.”
“That’s rich,” Kelly said. “You come in here, you lie to me, you say you know something about me, and now you want my help? Get out.”
She wasn’t getting up to enforce her command to leave, so Pammy wasn’t going to stand either.
“I don’t even know where to begin,” Pammy said. “That’s part of the problem.”
“I don’t care,” Kelly said, but her words had a little less force behind them.
“I run a gym—”
“We established that. And I don’t want another goddamn class. I can barely handle the ones I’ve got. Now get out.”
“—it’s off Telegraph,” Pammy said. “We’ve been seeing some disturbing things.”
“I’ll bet,” Kelly said. “You old people find everything young people do disturbing.”
Pammy squared her shoulders.
“A number of people have gone missing,” Pammy said, soldiering forward. “Activists, people in the Movement.”
She deliberately used Strawberry’s phrase.
Kelly’s chin had gone up. Her face was turned slightly, as if she were both fascinated and frightened. She no longer seemed to want to look at Pammy head-on.
“On Saturday night,” Pammy said, “a friend of mine saw a man in a one-ton pickup truck slam a woman’s head against the truck and toss her into the truck’s bed.”
What color remaining in Kelly’s face drained away. She looked greenish and sick.
“And my friend, who is very competent, tried to stop the truck, but couldn’t. She got the license plate, and reported it, but the police never came.”
“Yeah,” Kelly said, but it sounded like the word had slipped out, like she hadn’t planned to speak at all.
“We’re hoping to find the woman, but while we’ve been looking, we’ve discovered all these other missing people.”
“And you’re doing this…because…why? Because you’re nice?” Kelly’s words were sharp but she looked even queasier than she had a moment before.
“My friend—none of us, really—can sit idly by. If the police won’t look, we have to. That’s why I opened the gym. It’s for women only—”
“Oh, here’s the pitch,” Kelly said.
“No,” Pammy said hastily. “That’s not it at all. I’ve lost too many friends to violence that the police won’t investigate. I’m doing my bit to stop that from happening.”
“Altruism at its best,” Kelly said.
Pammy flushed. This girl was trying to get under her skin, and damn if she wasn’t succeeding.
“My roommate from my freshman year, my roommate here in Stern Hall, she was beaten to death by her husband. We all knew it was coming,” Pammy said. “The police wouldn’t do anything because her husband had friends in the department. He was important. And no one ever charged him with murder because he claimed it was an accident, and no one investigated. She had a lot of accidents. She fell down the stairs and walked into doors and got her arm twisted in the strangest ways. And being accident-prone killed her.”
The color was starting to come back to Kelly MacGivers’ face. She was looking up, watching through her eyelashes as if she couldn’t quite handle what Pammy was saying, but she couldn’t look away either.
Pammy was working to keep her voice level, but emotion was creeping into it anyway. She didn’t want to sound as charged as Kelly was.
“I kept telling her to leave him,” Pammy said, “but she wouldn’t. And then, just before she died, our friend Barbara was attacked near the Presidio. She had gone down there for some event. And she was dressed wrong or she was alone or something. Anyway, she was attacked, and killed, and maybe, just maybe, if my two friends—my best friends from my freshman year—maybe if they had known how to fight back, maybe I wouldn’t be talking to you. Maybe I’d be drinking tea at some society function, happily oblivious to the darker side of my town. Maybe you could be alone like you claim you want to be.”
Pammy was probably being too harsh, but she couldn’t stop now. The memories of the good times here at Stern, and the way everything had turned dark, got to her, along with Kelly’s constant ping-ponging between terror and anger. Pammy had seen that before in someone who had been attacked.
Kelly had raised her head all the way and was looking at her directly as if Pammy were something she had never seen before.
Pammy wanted to clear her throat, make the growing lump go away, but she didn’t. The emotion was reaching Kelly, maybe as much as the words.
“You were one of the people that other students had said disappeared,” Pammy said. “My list says you were active in some women’s issues causes and you participated in some anti-Vietnam rallies. Then everyone says you disappeared. So my friend—the same one who saw the woman kidnapped—she called hospitals trying to trace the people who were injured, and she found out about you.”
“They told her?” Kelly’s voice rose slightly in panic.
Pammy sighed. The pain in Kelly’s question deflated some of Pammy’s anger.
“They told her very little,” Pammy said gently. “Just enough to let us know you had been beaten, and your parents acted strange.”
“No shit,” Kelly said, but there was no power behind the words. “My parents are strange.”
“I was hoping you could tell us if you knew anything about the man in the truck,” Pammy said. “If there was a man in the truck. If we’re not misreading what happened.”
She wanted to add, If we are, then please talk to me. Tell me what happened with your parents so I can help.
But she didn’t. Kelly was defensive enough.
Kelly had frozen in place. Her expressive face had gone pale again. “You’re not misreading.”
“You were taken by a man in a one-ton pickup?” Pammy asked.
Kelly nodded.
“He beat you and tossed you away like you meant nothing to him?” Pammy asked.
Kelly’s mouth twisted in a bitter smile. “Oh, I meant something to him,” she said softly. “I meant money.”
“He blackmailed your parents?” Pammy asked. Maybe they hadn’t paid quickly enough. Maybe they had not believed the man.
“No, he didn’t blackmail my parents.” Kelly’s voice had become so soft that Pammy had to lean forward to hear her. “My parents hired him. And so far, they’re really happy with the work he’s done.”
41
Eagle
Eagle parked her truck as close to Grove Street as she could get. She didn’t like to park near government buildings. There were too many rules and regulations. So she parked on Addison, and walked the few blocks to the building, tugging on her outfit the entire time.
After meeting with Pammy and Val, Eagle had gone home and dressed like a real person. She figured it would get her traction with the cops if she looked her age, instead of like an adult college student who liked to get high.
Her look and her address had hurt her the first time she had seen these cops. She wanted just a little credibility the second time.
So she was wearing the only dress she had. It was a white sleeveless cotton number that almost made her look like she should be on her way to first communion or something—if she were eight, which she most decidedly was not. She paired it with white pumps that made her feet hurt, particularly on the walk to the precinct.
She had draped a blue sweater over her shoulders to ward off the day’s chill. And, God save her, she carried a clutch purse. She was a bit startled she still owned one—and she’d had to wipe off the vinyl sides so that it at least looked slightly white.
She had drawn the line at makeup though. She had never known how to put on the real stuff—eyeliner, rouge—and she used to use a little lipstick, but the tube she’d found had caked into some kind of sweet-smelling red mass. She had tossed it away.
Her ensemble, much as she hated it, had gotten her past the entry, past some woman who wanted to take her police report, and had actually gotten her to the desk sergeant.
He was a beefy, ruddy-faced man in blue, with watery eyes and broken capillaries in his nose. Eagle recognized the alcohol-induced redness. She would go the same direction if she weren’t careful.
The desk was built deliberately high so that no one could launch themselves across it. The heels made her five-ten, five-eleven, and still the desk came up to her shoulders.
“I’m here for Detective Brunsan,” she said, deliberately keeping her voice soft and nonthreatening. “I have information on something I reported on Sunday.”
She had opted to see the older detective, the one who was blunt and slightly mean. The younger one hadn’t listened to her, despite their shared military service. She doubted he would listen to her now.
“You shoulda called, ma’am,” the desk sergeant said. “Our detectives, they don’t normally sit at a desk.”
“I know,” she said, already feeling some disappointment. “But I was in the neighborhood and I figured this was easier than having him come to my home.”
She said it in such a way that it implied she—the middle-class woman the desk sergeant had just called ma’am—didn’t want her neighbors to see the police.
“I’ll see if he’s here.” The desk sergeant looked around. One of the nearby chairs had a sleeping long-hair in it. Another had a black man, head bowed, arms folded. “Just stand to one side, okay?”
Clearly, he didn’t want this “lady” that Eagle was pretending to be to sit near either man.
Eagle stepped back. She held her purse in both hands, remembering why she hated a clutch. You had to clutch the damn thing. You couldn’t hang it over your shoulder like something useful. You had to hold it, even if you didn’t want it. Although she could probably stuff it under one arm, like so many women did. She found that even more uncomfortable.
“Can I help you?”
She looked to her right. Brunsan stood there. He seemed even shorter than he had when he came to her apartment. The stink of a fresh cigar clung to him like body odor.
“Hey, I know you,” he said, frowning. He was trying to place her. That was proof enough at how different she looked.
“Is there somewhere we can talk, Detective?” she asked in her best “handle the brass” voice.
>
“Yeah, sure, come with me.”
He led her through a pale yellow door, covered with dirty fingerprints at chest level. He stepped into a large square room filled with mismatched desks. Each desk had one phone on it, a blotter, and too many files.
She wondered which desk was his.
But she didn’t get an answer. Just past the desks was a small room with windows that overlooked the detectives’ area. A single table fit in there, with only two chairs. It wasn’t an interrogation room, but it wasn’t comfortable either.
“Private,” he said, and stood until she entered. She waved her purse, as if to ask which side he wanted her on. “Sit anywhere.”
As if she had a lot of choice. She sat in the nearest chair, regretting the white dress. She wondered how much filth was now covering her back end.
She placed the purse on her lap, and folded her hands over it, deciding not to touch the table, which was stained with coffee rings.
“So, you know who I am,” Brunsan said as he sat across from her. “I’m sorry to ask, but who’re you again?”
“Captain June Eagleton,” Eagle said. “We met on Sunday.”
“Jesus, yeah, the military lady. I didn’t recognize you. You clean up nice.” He meant it as a compliment.
She made herself smile. “Thank you. I was wondering if you found the man yet? Because I have more information.”
“The man you called us about?” Brunsan asked. “The one who hit that girl and tossed her in his truck?”
“Yes.” Eagle was pleased he remembered so easily. She hadn’t expected it. She had expected more of a dance, like they had had on Sunday.
“Yeah, that guy,” Brunsan said. “We found him.”
She blinked in surprise. She hadn’t expected that answer. She also hadn’t expected the relief that flooded through her.
“You found him,” she said, letting some of that relief out. “And the woman?”
“He didn’t have no girl with him, and I’ll be honest with you, Captain, I looked. I looked hard.” He wasn’t belligerent like he had been on Sunday. He was treating her with respect. That surprised her too.
Protectors Page 40
