by Mark Nykanen
In the next few minutes, fourteen of them assembled, which meant two were missing, Barr and one other. She scanned the list and saw that it was Dan Kruber. He worked in a commercial bakery—had even showed up last week with flour dusting his brow and hands. He had forearms as thick and ropy as braided dough, which had made the throttling of his soon-to-be ex-wife almost lethal. She’d passed out from fright before she could die from lack of air. He’d thought he’d killed her. Lucky and ignorant, that about summed up Dan the baker. And now absent. He hadn’t called, either. Two more, she thought, and Danny boy wouldn’t be baking anymore bread, because his buns will be in jail.
She took their logs and handed back the ones she’d reviewed from the week before.
“You have any questions about anything I wrote down,” she said, holding up one of the logs,” you can ask me or Lupe Sandoval during the break. She’s filling in for Renata tonight. Same rules apply. Don’t go testing her, because we don’t have time for that.”
Gwyn took the money, too, keeping track of who paid full fare—twenty dollars –who got a sliding scale discount, and who got a court-sponsored free ride.
“Does anyone know where Dan is?” Gwyn asked as the last of the men settled themselves.
Nobody did, apparently.
“Barr Onstott?” Gwyn’s voice rose above the murmur once more, though she didn’t think she could possibly have missed him, or the stir he would have caused.
“Who’s he?” Jesse snapped, blonde hair greased back as if the sinewy thirty-two year-old motorcycle mechanic had been raised on the cultural milk of James Dean and Bobby Rydell. More like shots of rye with a beer chaser, judging by his brutal background: blue-collar, alcoholic father and battered mother. Battered himself, badly enough to end up in ER twice before the age of ten. Like too many guys clawing their way out of hellhole homes, he’d wasted no time in trying to control his own wife with his fists, with predictably disastrous results. The last time he’d beat her, he’d also threatened to chop off her head with an axe.
Gwyn knew Jesse didn’t like surprises, and a new face would be a surprise. Wait’ll he sees this one, she said to herself. “New member,” she said to him.
She offered a more complete introduction to Lupe, and Lupe - all her sassy effervescence neatly capped—had asked the men to introduce themselves. As the last of them mumbled his name, Barr walked in. He already had his hat off, and now wore a shirt unbuttoned to the nipple line. He accepted their stares without blinking.
“Take a good look. Let’s get it over with.”
Gwyn saw a pattern with his opening line, but not with the way he presented himself.
“What the fuck happened to you, man?” Sotto voce, so sotto Gwyn couldn’t pinpoint the source.
“A little respect, please,” she said. “This is Barr Onstott.”
”You get dipped in the deep fryer, dude?” Frank Owens going for the cheap laugh. You’d think having white skin in L.A. County Jail would have shut him up, but he was probably just big and brutal enough to have swaggered through his one-year sentence. He had the face of a forty-year-old who’d seen too much and understood too little, which made the cheap laugh, when he got it, such a prize.
Before Gwyn could speak up, Barr walked right over to him.
Let it go, her instincts told her. Lupe, playing rhythm, took her cue and held back after moving two steps.
“I was burned in a god . . . ” he threw a glance at Gwyn, who nodded slightly in appreciation, “. . . in a fire. I’ve known more pain than you’ll ever see, so do . . . not . . . mess . . . with . . . me.”
Frank surprised her by keeping his mouth shut and looking away, his dark droopy eyes and flaccid features retreating as his heavy arms crossed his chest.
Gwyn sensed that a dog fight had ended before it ever really began. Fairly typical. But she also picked up a chilly vibe from Barr’s display, and realized as he pulled a chair from the wall and sat that it was the feeling she sometimes got from a truly desperate man, the guy who feels he has nothing left to lose. She’d met hundreds of batterers, but only a few men who fit that profile. Two of them had turned out to be killers. Maybe for the women of the world, Barr’s scars and the response they provoked would prove a blessing.
Gwyn had pegged each of the men by the end of the last meeting, their second. With intake, court and police records, personal histories, social worker memoranda from home visits and observing the men in the group, she had a good idea of who was here to change, who was here to beat jail or prison time, who was here to become a better liar and who would simply screw up again and again until he landed among equals in prison.
She stored a tough response for each of them, especially guys like Frank who talked out of turn with a bluster that tried to belittle her efforts. The justice system, flawed as it was, gave her plenty to work with, so when she said they were going to watch a report about the sex trade and would talk about its relationship to the crimes they’d committed against their partners, she had little patience for Frank’s, “Hey, I slapped the bitch, I didn’t pimp her ass.”
Several guys did laugh, which infuriated her.
“What’d you do to end up here?” Gwyn shot back.
“Me?” Frank used both hands to point to himself. A few of the men evidently found that funny, too.
Gwyn stared at him, his slouching shoulders, thick torso and thunder thighs relaxed as mud, and warned herself that no matter what, she had to stay calm. He’d get what he had coming. “Yes, you, Frank Owens. Tell all of us what you did to end up here.”
“She was—”
“No.” Gwyn shook her head as her voice lowered. ”I don’t want to hear what she did. I want you to tell all these guys what you did.”
“I can’t tell you what I did till I tell you what she did,” Frank countered in a singsong voice.
“Then you, Frank Owens, are going to do some more time, because your parole is going to get revoked. Only now,” she tapped her foot audibly on the old linoleum floor, “you’re going into the state prison system, and that’s where you’re going to find out first-hand about gangs and a whole different kind of sex trade.”
She saw his lips move, read “bitch” from ten feet away.
“You want to apologize now for calling me a bitch, or you want to leave?”
“Get kicked out twice, you go straight to jail,” Lupe chimed in even as she moved to open the door for Frank. “ ‘Do not pass Go. Do not collect two hundred dollars.’”
Gwyn had seen Lupe confront dangerous men, including gang-bangers and bikers, and knew she was exactly the kind of woman you wanted covering your back. In June she’d taken third in her weight class in the All California Kick-Boxing Championships.
After Frank muttered, “I’m sorry,” Gwyn dropped a cassette tape into the player and turned up the volume.
“I give you Mr. Frank Owens,” she said to the group.
A young girl screams with terrifying urgency, “Help, please help. He’s beating my mommy.”
From the background, Frank’s distinctive voice booms, “Get off that fucking phone you little cunt.”
“Please,” the girl cries. “He’s coming.”
The sound of a punch, a horrifying explosion of fist on flesh. Grunts, struggle, the girl’s breath so short she’s issuing aborted shrieks that last no more than a second.
The 911 operator says, “The police are coming to your house right now. Is there some place safe you can hide?”
No answer. The girl’s not there.
A woman cries, “Don’t, Frank. Don’t!”
“He’s hurting her.” The little girl’s back on the phone sobbing. Then she screams, “No, Daddy, no. Don’t hit Mommy.”
The operator’s cool professional voice gets rattled now. “Hide. Run away. Get away from him. Now!”
“No, you come here,” the girl pleads. “My Mommy –”
“Frank, don’t you dare,” interrupts from the background. “Leave Melanie—”
Gwyn turned off the tape and eyed the room. Lupe looked like she wanted to kick-box Frank into the La Brea Tar Pits.
“You asshole,” Jesse said. “You hit your kid.”
Gwyn would let the anger roll for just a bit. She could see men shifting away from him.
“You did, you motherfucker.”
“Language,” Gwyn said, but that’s all she said.
Frank had paled. He didn’t look so relaxed anymore. An object lesson for all of them. Gwyn saw eyes landing on her shoulder bag, each of them, she figured, wondering what else she had inside. Talk about glass houses. But she knew for certain that only Frank Owens had actually claimed his kid had it coming for calling 911.
“We’re waiting, Frank. You got something to say now?” she asked him.
“I got nothing to say.”
“You had plenty to say the last two times we met. You had plenty to say earlier tonight. Why are you so quiet now, Frank?” Baiting him. Making or breaking him.
“I’m sorry,” he said softly.
“You said that. What are you sorry about, Frank?”
“I shouldn’t have hit her.”
“Which ‘her,’ Frank? Talk to us. You hit everyone that night, your wife, your kid. You punched and kicked your little five-year-old girl. What’s she weigh, Frank? Thirty-five, forty pounds?”
Frank stared at the floor.
“Does Melanie hate you now?”
He shook his head. “No.”
“What’d she tell you, this five-year-old, this kindergartner whose baby teeth you left on your kitchen floor, who was found choking on two of them when the cops arrived? What’d she say to you, Frank Owens?”
His head never stopped shaking, but now his shoulders moved, too. Silence in the room, the stony silence of a mausoleum. “Said,” Frank’s voice unsteady, “she was sorry.”
“Why was she sorry?”
“She said she was sorry she got me in trouble.”
“She was sorry she got you in trouble?”
A nod.
“Where’d she say that to you, Frank?”
“Children’s Hospital.”
“I’m gonna kill you, you motherfucker.” Jesse again.
“No, you’re not.” Lupe moved next to him in three quick strides.
Gwyn looked over, made sure Jesse wasn’t moving, before continuing. “Why were you at Children’s Hospital, Frank?”
“She wanted to see me.”
“Could she?”
“No.”
“Why’s that, Frank?”
“The bandages, they were still on her head.”
“How long was she there?”
“Two months.”
“Where is she now?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why don’t you know, Frank?”
“After I got out of jail, they wouldn’t tell me.”
Was Frank Owens faking his remorse? Was she only making him a better liar? Gwyn honestly didn’t know. After seeing his reaction to the tape, she could no longer easily peg him. If nothing else, she’d shut him up. Changed his behavior. Sometimes it stayed changed, and that’s all you can do. The heart remains a shriveled carapace harboring hate and all its latent horrors. But for a lot of wives and children, changing a batterer’s behavior is a miracle in itself. As for the heart, Gwyn believed for many of these men the only solution lay, in every sense of the word, with the mortician.
She played the news report from ABC’s 20/20, and talked about the way women are exploited in the sex trade overseas and in the States.
Lupe drew parallels to the power and control these men had lorded over their partners. But little Melanie Owens’ 911 call had changed the mood in the room.
During the break, the men wandered upstairs to the prickly lawn, some smoking, others stretching their legs. Barr wandered up to boxcar Chuck and Jesse, but no one talked to Frank. If this had been prison, he’d have been a marked man. Gwyn knew she’d have to work to bring him back into the fold in the next couple of weeks.
She and Lupe split them into two groups to review the control logs and stress logs. Gwyn pointed out to Kaj, one of the younger men at twenty-four, that he needed to do more to identify the triggers that set off his temper.
“Here,” she pointed to Kaj’s log. “Was this when your wife asked you to do something?”
“She doesn’t ask.”
“Then write that down in your stress log. And tell me how you deal with it in your control log.” She taught them how to make the links between themselves and the worlds they tried to destroy.
An hour later the class ended, Gwyn glad as ever that she had the power of the courts to hold over them. Of the sixteen men, including the absent without notice, Dan Kruber, she had maybe two guys who would have come of their own accord.
Lupe watched the last of them walk up the stairs into the summer twilight and closed the door. She turned to Gwyn and said, “You were hitting on all eight cylinders tonight, girlfriend.”
“Maybe too hard. You catch the mood change? They didn’t want to talk about much after that.”
“This isn’t happy hour. Good for the mood change. Frank, he’s an asshole. ‘Dipped in the fryer, dude?’ What’s with that shit? I’m glad you had that tape ready. He’s got to realize he’s an asshole, that’s square one. I’d say tonight was a hell of a good start.”
“Hope they don’t kill him.”
“Me?” Lupe used both hands to point to herself, mimicking Frank at the start of the evening. “I don’t care if they do.”
The door opened and they both spun around to see two men walking in the room.
“I’m Detective Beau Warren, L.A.P.D.,” announced a lean, bureaucratic looking white guy in rimless glasses and a blue windbreaker, “and this is Detective Elvis Trenton.”
Detective Trenton nodded his bald black head, shiny under the lights, and unbuttoned his tan blazer with a flick of his fingers, revealing a dauntingly outfitted shoulder holster, along with a belly as broad as Colorado Boulevard.
Lupe asked for ID, and both men gave her the fast wallet flip.
“I thought I was through with all the questions about Croce,” Gwyn said, feeling the dread that came along with these memories.
“We thought you were, too,” Detective Trenton said as he settled his ample frame onto the armrest of a couch, “but another one of your guys showed up dead.”
“What?” Gwyn’s hands gripped the desk to steady herself.
“Murdered,” Detective Warren said as he pulled out a small leather notebook and a black Cross pen. He performed a practiced twist of the barrel and wrote briefly. Fastidious as he was fiftyish.
“Dan?”
“That’s right, Daniel Kruber.” Warren peered at her with hard eyes that never fully opened to put you at ease, that appeared intended to intimidate. Snake eyes.
“How?” Gwyn was still too startled to think clearly, recalling only glimpses of Kruber from the week before, the flour on his face and hands.
“Strangled at work,” Detective Trenton said. “He was clubbed with the business end of a hammer. The medical examiner figures he was knocked unconscious and then choked to death.”
“Jesus.” Gwyn turned from them.
“Who did it?” Lupe asked.
“Don’t know yet,” Detective Warren said.
“Whoever he is, he’s a helluva poet,” Trenton said. You got anybody quoting Shelley or Keats around here?”
“You’re kidding, right? These guys?” Lupe shook her head.
Trenton pulled out a couple of sheets of paper from the inside pocket of his blazer, displaying more of his hardware. He unfolded one of them and handed it to Gwyn, a photocopy of a typewritten poem entitled, Just Desserts.
“Alfred died by the sword,
and Rick by the spoon.
&n
bsp; Each received as he gave,
and more will follow soon.”
“Found that one by Santini’s body two weeks ago. Then this one was stapled to Kruber’s fly:
Just Desserts, Take Two
“Alfred’s dead
and Rick’s in hell
with Kruber by his side.
fourteen left,
all for me,
and each of them will die.”
“’Rick by the spoon?’” Gwyn thought aloud. “I know he OD’d, and I guess addicts use spoons to heat their heroin, but—”
“It’s the pattern,” Detective Trenton said as he took back the poems. “Each one’s dying in a retributive way.” He said that word carefully, as if he’d practiced it.
“Why didn’t you tell me about Rick? Or warn anyone?”
“We’ve been watching,” Trenton said.
“I haven’t seen you.”
“You got to know where to look.”
“What about the men in the group? They’ve got a right to know,” Gwyn said. “They should have been told right away. Kruber might be alive if –”
“We doubt that. First of all, L.A.P.D. is not going to assign every one of these guys a personal security officer,” Trenton said. “Politically, it’s not going to happen. Wife beaters? No way. Second, we didn’t know for sure that it wasn’t a crank when we found the note by Santini. You know, someone messing with us. It happens more than you’d think. Finally, we didn’t say anything to them because all of them are suspects, and we didn’t want to tip our hand if we didn’t have to. But between tonight and tomorrow they’re all getting a visit from us.”
“How do you figure them as suspects?” Gwyn asked.
