Trashy Chic

by Cathy Lubenski

  Washington jumped in: “We have your record here—(record!? She had a record?)—You’ve been arrested for indecent exposure, is that how you hooked Lomax—did you flash him?”

  Indecent expo … Bertie remembered. She’d been dating a jock in college who’d dumped her badly. One day when she was riding to class with Kate, she’d spotted him and mooned him. Unfortunately, the cop standing behind him had seen her and given her a ticket. Bertie had been tempted to tell him that it was a “bum” rap but, although the cop had been laughing when he wrote her up, she didn’t want to tempt his good humor too far. She’d paid a fine and done some community service, and now she had a record?

  Bertie was getting confused by the detectives’ rapid-fire questions. After an hour, she’d lashed out at Hausen, “You big drizzlehead, haven’t you been listening to what I’ve been saying?”

  A few seconds later:”Lomax was getting ready to sue old man Bellingham. If we went to your apartment, would we find blood there? Maybe Robert Bellingham’s blood?”

  She blanched. There was blood in her apartment where she’d stabbed herself with the little hand of her alarm clock. Would they believe that? Who would? It was so stupid. She’d cleaned up the blood as best as she could but there were stains in the carpet. It took about three weeks for DNA results, would they arrest her and hold her in jail till then?

  The detectives saw the sudden look of fear on her face, and started hammering questions at her like nails in her coffin. Just as suddenly, they switched tactics: Would she strip so they could examine her body for signs of a struggle, presumably with Lomax? Good lord, her left arm was bruised from wrist to shoulder. She involuntarily flinched and, again, the detectives took note.

  That was when Bertie called in the cavalry. She invoked her right to legal representation and called Kate to get a lawyer, any lawyer, and get him to the station. She also asked Kate to bring something for her feet.

  Kate, shocked, went into best-friend mode. Bertie could hear her waking Dave and telling him to call his friend, George, the lawyer.

  “I’ll be right there, Bertie. Hang in there, help is on the way,” Kate said.

  She was left alone in the interrogation room, waiting for the lawyer. It was cold; Bertie figured that was to keep suspects awake, which was silly because who wouldn’t be wide awake if they were being accused of murder. TV had taught her a lot about situations like this. She knew not to look too casual—that was the sign of a psychopath who murdered with no sign of remorse.

  Don’t fall asleep -- that meant she wasn’t worried about the consequences of her murderous rage (see psychopath, above).

  Don’t ask for food (no conscience -- how could anyone eat at a time like this?).

  Bertie was hungry, cold and sleepy. She was on the express train to psycho-town.

  So she sat. She assumed she was being watched and was tempted to do something memorably disgusting—chew on her toenails, sniff her armpits or pick her nose and wipe it on the table, but resisted.

  When the door to freedom finally opened, a well-dressed man with a baby face entered, followed by Detective Hausen.

  “Hello, Bertie,” the man said. “I’m your legal representation. Marty Forbush of Forbush, Langly, Schmidt, Dillingworth, Smallton, Merriwether, and Abernathy. I’ve arranged for you to leave. Now!”

  He shot a stern look at the detective, who didn’t look too upset. Bertie didn’t argue. She fled through the door and to the elevator before anyone could change their mind, Forbush behind her. She practically fell out of the elevator into Kate’s arms when the doors opened. She and Dave were standing there looking disheveled and worried.

  “Are you all right, Bertie?” Kate asked, as she handed her a pair of fuzzy slippers with cats’ faces on the toes. Bertie slipped them on, and the beady cats’ eyes stared accusingly at her.

  “Oh, great,” she thought, “even the cats are looking at me like I’m guilty.”

  The four of them stood huddled in the big lobby like couples on a blind date—uneasy but compelled to talk.

  “I was so worried -- we were so worried,” Katie said as Dave nodded beside her.

  “I’m OK,” Bertie said. “Just really shaken up and scared. What do I do next, Mr. Forbush?”

  “Go home and get some rest, all of us,” he said, his pink cheeks glowing. “We’ll talk again tomorrow... today,” he said, looking at his very expensive watch. “We’re going to have to get you new representation; I’m a dental malpractice lawyer, so I don’t feel comfortable advising you in the long term.

  “However, I can warn you not to talk with anyone about the case and your involvement. No one. I understand you work for a newspaper. Especially do not talk to your colleagues or anyone else from any media outlet. These people are your friends, but they’re also in the business of gathering the news. You are now the news.”

  “I understand,” Bertie said. She was beginning to comprehend how drastically her life was going to change now that she was a murder suspect.

  “I’ll start looking around for a criminal defense attorney to represent you and give you a few names.”

  Kate took her arm as Dave and Forbush walked ahead discussing whatever dentists and dental malpractice lawyers talk about -- the tooth, the whole tooth, and nothing but the tooth, Bertie supposed.

  It was early morning, 2 a.m. The air was fresh with a chill, damp wind blowing in from the ocean, shredding the fog. There were few people on the street, but as they left the building, Shawn stepped out of the shadows.

  “Hello, Bertie. How are you?”

  She almost cried to see him, another friendly face. She hugged him.

  “How did you know I was here? I’m so glad to see you.”

  He didn’t smile. “A source called and said someone from the paper was being questioned for the murder of Lester Lomax. I came down to see who it was. I had no idea it was you. What happened, Bertie?”

  She opened her mouth to reply, then realized he hadn’t given her even a cursory hug back. His handsome face was as neutral as she’d ever seen it. He still wasn’t smiling. A chill ran through her.

  “On my lawyer’s advice, I can’t talk to anyone, Shawn, not even you. Or maybe especially not you?” She made it a question hoping for some kind of reassurance that she wasn’t just a story.

  “Hey, I understand,” Shawn said. “Maybe I’ll see you later.” He entered the station, presumably to get the dirt on her from one of his “sources.” She hadn’t felt so rebuffed since the jock in college. Mooning wasn’t an option this time.

  Kate put her arm around her and gave her a hug. “C’mon, let’s get you home. It’s late and it’s cold.” She started toward Dave’s BMW, Bertie shuffling along in the cat slippers.

  She looked up to see Mad staring at her from the street corner. She held his gaze for a long 10 seconds, then he turned and walked away into the night.

  CHAPTER TWENTY NINE

  Bertie had to battle with Katie and Dave to go home. They wanted her to stay with them but Bertie just wanted to shower away the stink of the interrogation room and go to sleep in her own bed.

  Updated psycho report: She was hungry, sleepy and planned to be as warm as possible as soon as possible. She called in sick again and laid awake for an hour, unable to sleep.

  That poor man—she’d never forget the bloody mask that was his face and his zombie walk. Or the squish he made when he fell. She hadn’t liked him, but that was too much to wish on anyone.

  Obnoxious little Lester Lomax... short guys and guys with big trucks were always trying to prove something. Bertie’s theory was that they were making up for a small penis, but she wasn’t going to ask Mrs. Lomax for confirmation on that.

  Lester probably had had more enemies than friends, based on her short acquaintance with him. Could it have been a jilted paramour? His libido certainly didn’t seem to have been stunted. Or a client he’d cheated?

  Then, of course, there was his connection to the Bellingham murder through John Gard
ener, the same John Gardener who’d showed up so quickly after the police arrived. That weasly brain-whacked monkey-sniffing pea-witted toad-bagging pancake-licking vomit-wearing jagoff.

  So she’d puked on him—big deal. Some men would find that charming. And just because of a little vomit, he’d told the police about her `history’ with Lester and had obviously made it sound as bad as possible. C’mon, gimme a break. He was now near the top of her suspect hit parade.

  Then there was GiGi … after fleeing the hotel, she could’ve easily doubled back and done the deed. The battered red car and its driver would’ve stood out among the Beemers, Mercedeses and other all-’round swell cars parked in the lot, but GiGi—in her designer dress and shoes—would’ve blended right in, even with lumpy hair.

  Bertie knew she was in a tub of trouble, and trying to pin the crime … either crime or any crime … on someone else wasn’t going work unless she could prove it.

  She was trying very hard not to think of Madison and the look he’d given her before walking away, or Shaun, that bobble-headed turnip-twisting … She stopped, took three deep breaths and rolled over. She fell asleep thinking of fuzzy slippers with cats’ heads.

  The morning paper had a sniglet of a story buried inside. Shawn had obviously made deadline for the last edition.

  Attorney Murdered

  In Parking Lot

  At Bel Air Hotel

  She searched rapidly through the five graphs for her name and sighed with relief when she didn’t find it.

  Bertie was relieved when Marty Forbush called. “I found a lawyer for you,” he said. “His name is Purvis Mowbray and if you’re OK with it, he’ll see you today at 3.”

  “The sooner the better. Who is this guy?”

  “I called around and asked who would be best for you and almost everyone described him as a ‘bulldog.’ He doesn’t have a big rep like Mark Geragos, but at least he wins some of his cases.”

  Bertie was at Mowbray’s office 45 minutes early because she was too nervous to sit still. The lobby was all steel, stone and uncomfortable chairs. In the interior design world, the more uncomfortable the chair the more it cost.

  She was finally ushered into Mowbray’s office where the lawyer sprang to his feet and grabbed her arm to escort her to a seat. Fortunately, it was her uninjured arm.

  “Hello, hello,” he said. “I’m Pervis Mowbray. You can call me anything you like, but don’t call me Perv. Ha ha ha.”

  His booming laugh startled Bertie. Even though he was short, the man filled up the room. He was good-looking in a hard sort of way with a boyish fringe of blond hair that fell across his brow like Robert Redford’s and blue eyes fringed with wrinkles. He wore cowboy boots and Bertie was sure it was to make himself look taller. She peeked around him and saw a law degree from Harvard.

  “Now, tell me everything,” he said after they’d been seated. When she finished, he sat there thinking.

  “It sounds to me like you’re in a peck of trouble that is none of your making,” he finally said, “but of course that’s not going to cut it with the cops. Other than the obvious, is there anything you’re especially worried about?”

  Bertie told him about the blood on her carpet and her injured shoulder, both of which she’d managed to conceal from the police. He spent some more time deep in thought. Bertie was relieved; thinking was good.

  “OK, here’s what we’re going to do,” Perv said. (Now that he put the idea in her mind, she couldn’t think of him as anything but Perv.) “If you don’t mind, I’m going to have my secretary, who’s also a notary, take pictures of your shoulder. I imagine it’s pretty bruised, am I right?”

  Bertie nodded.

  “OK, she’ll date those pictures. That way, they can’t claim you got a bum shoulder from wrestling with Lomax before you killed him. There’s no way your shoulder would bruise up that fast if you’d just wrenched it the night before. Are they yellow and green or purple?”

  “They’re yellow with some purple.”

  “Good, good. That means they’re already starting to heal. Do you have any witnesses to how and when you hurt it?”

  “Two, maybe four, but I can’t count on two of them.”

  “Excellent!” He beamed at her.

  “Then, my secretary will go to your apartment and take pictures and samples of the blood stains. Is anything still visible?”

  “Yes, I tried to get them out, but you know how blood is.”

  His big laugh boomed out again, making Bertie jump. “I’m a criminal defense lawyer. Of course I know how blood is,” he said. “Ha ha ha. See if you can find locate any more parts of the clock you demolished. If you can, have my secretary take pictures of them, too. She’ll bag them up, too.”

  “I’m sure there will be some. I’m not a very good housekeeper.”

  “Wonderful, wonderful! I wish all my clients were like you.”

  Bertie had never been so complimented on her lack of womanly skills.

  “So what do you think, Perv..is?” Bertie asked.

  “What do I think? I think there are a lot of other people who could’ve aerated Lester. He’s been censured by the bar a couple of times for his shady dealings, and that means a bunch of unhappy clients out there. And Mrs. Lester filed for divorce not that long ago after she got tired of her hubby sticking it to any woman who didn’t get out of his way fast enough. Nothing like a woman scorned for a good defense.

  “And look who just ‘happened’ to end up in the same place at the same time. Mrs. Gigi Bellingham and John Gardener the gardener. Both of them are mixed up in old R1’s murder a lot more than you are.”

  “That’s good, right?”

  “In theory, yes, but once the police, who have very limited imaginations, fixate on someone—you in this case—it’s hard to change their minds. That’s why you MUST NOT talk to anyone about your part in this case. I know you work for a newspaper, so you just go to work as usual and mind your own business.

  “If there are any problems, if the police come knocking at your door, you call me. Here’s the office number and my private cell number.” He handed her a business card. “I mean it, you call me if a cop so much as smiles at you.”

  The cops at her door? Bertie had gone from feeling pretty good to a bad case of the droops.

  Things couldn’t get any worse.

  Ha, ha, ha.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Kate and Dave took her out to dinner at a big-name restaurant that night. The casual conversation amid the muted clink of expensive wine glasses helped keep her mind off her troubles, but she felt conspicuous.

  She was sure she could hear people whispering: “This filet is excellent, but isn’t that the woman who was being questioned for murder last night? Yes, yes, it is! She had two cats on her feet, I’d know her anywhere.”

  But Kate was a gem, distracting her when she got too pensive, and Dave was just a great guy. He’d adopted his girlfriend’s problem friend as if she was his own problem friend. With his close-cropped brown hair, dazzling blue eyes and wide smile, he’d be really hot if it wasn’t for his obsession with flossing.

  As she drove to work the next morning her stomach was churning and her mind racing. She’d decided that the best strategy was to be casual but firm: “A murder? Well, yes, but sorry, can’t talk about it … lawyer’s orders.”

  Traffic was light—a good sign. She got a parking spot close to the building—another good sign except that it came right after the first good sign. Too many good signs were a bad sign. Something hideously awful was going to happen; this was the natural order of the universe.

  As she walked through the glass doors into the reception area, she heard the twittering of birds. Oops, not birds, the bank of receptionists at the front desk. She looked straight ahead and almost made it to the elevator when one of them called her back. The woman studied her face avidly, as if murder had left an imprint there, and Bertie wanted to tell her to go buy a National Enquirer and get over it. The woman handed he
r a note without saying a word.

  “See me as soon as you get in.” Don wasn’t counting on her ignoring a computer message this time.

  She didn’t go to her desk, but took a straight path to his office, a first in her years there. He was looking at his computer screen, which was turned away from the door. The speculation was that he was addicted to porn sites starring dwarves with Popsicles.

  “Hey, Don, what’s up?” Bertie asked.

  “Sit down, Bertie, please.” He got up and shut the door. She could feel the reverse-Karma god stirring, getting ready to strike.

  “Bertie, I understand you were questioned by the police last night about your involvement in the Bel Air murder.”

  “Excuse me, Don, but I didn’t have any involvement in the murder. I want that clear. I was involved in finding the body when it shimmied down the side of my car, that’s all.”

  “That’s not my understanding. Were you questioned by the police last night?”

  “Yes, but...”

  “Thank you for the straight answer, Bertie,” he said. She really did hate this man. “And did you refuse to talk to Shawn about the murder?”

  “Yes, but that was on the advice of my attorney. And that’s still the advice of my attorney.”

  “Bertie,” his voice softened and she braced for the worst. “It’s our decision to suspend you until we see how this situation resolves itself.”

  Bertie was stunned. This was a lot worse than she’d ever imagined.

  “Wait a minute, what happened to ‘innocent until proven guilty’?”

  “It has nothing to do with your innocence or guilt. It’s going to be very awkward for all of us if you’re being investigated for a murder that we’re covering. That was clear last night when you penalized Shawn for doing his job.”

  “Shawn was penalized? I don’t remember it that way, but it doesn’t matter. This just isn’t fair. I’m being suspended for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  “Have you been interviewing people about the Bellingham murder as a reporter with this paper?”