Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  He said they’d have a reporter live from the murder scene in Glendale in moments. Try immediately. A “field anchor” with the catchy if unlikely name of Cassie Cannon broke in with a breathy report.

  “This marks the latest victim in what police are now calling ’The Men’s Group Murders.’ The group in question is run by Gwyn Sanders, the spousal abuse counselor whose intervention two months ago in a police standoff did not prevent the televised shotgun slaying of Sharon Croce, which was followed by the fatal police shooting of her husband, Alfred Croce.

  “Simmonds becomes the third man murdered in just the past two weeks in a group Sanders runs in Pomona. A police source told KNZ that Sanders is a major suspect in these killings because of her alleged role in the brutal murder of her stepfather twenty-three years ago.”

  Gwyn slumped in the car seat, drove with no more awareness of the road than a hamster his flywheel.

  That’s why those detectives are there. And Mommsa probably doesn’t even know it yet.

  Gwyn got yet another busy signal as Cassie Cannon continued. “A detective says the Men’s Group Murderer has left a poem with each victim. These documents have not been released yet.” Cannon signed off, promising more live reports as the story developed.

  Simmonds had been so cold that he’d made Gwyn shiver, and she didn’t like to shiver. Not once had he expressed regret for slapping his size two wife so hard that he’d split her lip and chipped her front tooth with his bulbous insignia ring, or for throwing her into a dumpster in an alley behind their house and hurling a skateboard at her.

  That wasn’t his first assault, either, as it turned out; but it was the first time a neighbor bothered to call 911.

  Gwyn couldn’t say he’d made any progress in the group, and she couldn’t honestly say she’d miss him. She cared for most of her clients, but not for him.

  A more pressing concern was what awaited her in Santa Barbara. Not just Mommsa and her do-nothing contractor, Mr. Huffy Pants, and not just those two coffee cake-sniffing detectives. The media mob would be there as well by the time she arrived. She’d bet gold bullion to lead bullets that they’d spent the morning scanning the police-band and revving their engines. Gwyn could picture the TV crews racing their news vans down the car pool lane right now, and felt very much like a snail that had just glimpsed the escargot.

  Chapter 5

  Gwyn’s worst fears had not materialized.

  Here she’d been plagued with Daliesque visions of microwaves dishes, dozens of them rising from the roofs of news vans like the ogling heads of stilt-legged, metallic insects, not to mention the reporters themselves: an elbow-checking, tie-flapping, hemline-dancing horde. And none of it had come to pass. Na-da. They’d left her in peace. What a blessing. Looked like the worst she’d have to deal with was the unmarked police cruiser blocking Mommsa’s driveway.

  She grabbed her shoulder bag and climbed out, easing past a teeming lilac bush when she was startled almost senseless. Surely speechless.

  Blanche Gable’s intense stare made her step back and freeze. Next to her stood a man with a camera balanced on his shoulder like a rocket launcher. “Talk to me. Say something good,” Blanche said in a voice hard enough to rake the eyes from a puppy, “or you’ll be one sorry suspect.”

  She must have been hiding in the bushes like a python waiting for her prey to pass. A real opportunity eater. Indeed, a narrow green leaf poked from the crown of her Brillo-pad hair.

  Blanche Gable was, in her own estimation, one of the most attractive, intelligent women in Los Angeles television. Not even a mean-spirited, snicker-inducing description of her in L.A. magazine as “. . . the saddle-skinned, hair-challenged cable queen, who bears a bizarre facial resemblance to Squeaky Fromme during her dumpster-diving heyday . . . ” could drain the bottomless flute of her bubbly self-esteem. She’d been Daddy’s girl, and now she was the world’s. Just ask her.

  She also prided herself on having a raptor’s eye. This, sadly, had been borne out by recent events. She’d been the reporter who’d first spotted Gwyn at the Croce standoff, and then outed her by shouting her name, which might have led to Sharon Croce’s brutal death.

  As Gwyn regained her emotional bearings, another news woman came racing up, stopping a frame short of clipping her in the jaw with a microphone.

  “Cassie Cannon,” she panted, “KNZ Radio,” issued in the same breathless style Gwyn had first noticed on the drive up here. Her name and voice had evoked a silky, blonde-streaked beach volleyball goddess; but unfortunately for poor Cassie, who had a kind, earnest manner, she appeared stringy as beef gristle with the sort of ravaged complexion that gave pizza pies metaphorical weight.

  “Never mind her,” Blanche cut in. “She’s just going to poach whatever you tell me anyway.”

  “I’m not talking to anyone,” Gwyn said.

  She looked around quickly to see if other TV crews were ready to drop from the trees, or notebook-toting reporters were burrowing up from the lawn like prairie dogs with pens. But no, these two appeared to be it.

  Easy enough to avoid. Gwyn darted between Blanche and Cassie, but hadn’t moved two steps before the cable news princess stuck out her foot and tripped her with the casual, practiced ease of a roach-stomping landlord.

  “You rolling?” she asked her cameraman. Blanche reached down, all graciousness and concern, and offered Gwyn a hand to help her to her feet.

  If Gwyn had been a mite more media-savvy, a scintilla less concerned with the irritating task of brushing dead grass off her clothes, and a pinch more aware of the blip potential of an angry, expletive-filled response, she would have kept her mouth closed.

  She compounded her error by pushing Blanche out of the way—also captured by the camera—and ran toward the house where Mommsa stood beaming in the doorway.

  Now she smiles?

  As she bounded up the stairs to the porch, she heard Blanche intoning in a voice now more melodramatic than menacing, “Just seconds ago, Gwyn Sanders, the woman identified by police sources as the chief suspect in the men’s group murders, struck this reporter as she . . . ”

  What the . . . Gwyn whipped around, but Mommsa pulled her inside.

  “Come-come, you’re letting all the cold air out.”

  Gwyn stormed past Mommsa, counting to ten—better make that twenty—and didn’t stop moving until she closed the door in the guest bathroom and splashed cold water on her face. As she dried off, it occurred to her that no one had been in Mommsa’s lavishly appointed living room.

  Probably in the kitchen inhaling coffee cake, she thought as she headed toward the ocean view side of the house.

  Exactamente.

  The familiar forms of Detectives Trenton and Warren perched on stools at a kitchen island the size of Catalina. Their crumb-littered ceramic plates and coffee cups sat next to their elbows on the Mexican tile breakfast bar.

  “Would you like some coffee cake, dear?” Mommsa held up a platter with the catch of the day.

  Gwyn felt herself on the verge of exploding.

  Don’t go off on her. Don’t.

  “No, I do not want any coffee cake,” Gwyn said evenly. She knew she’d said it evenly because she’d ground her teeth as she spoke.

  She grabbed a glass out of one of the hand-carved cabinets (not by Mommsa, she didn’t do furnishings.) and pressed it against the wide-body refrigerator’s water dispenser.

  “Hi, Gwyn. Nice to see you again.” As Trenton offered his greeting, his ample girth rotated the stool seat till he faced her. Then he folded his arms across his broad chest, drawing his tan blazer tightly over his shoulder holster, the butt of his gun protruding like a visible sign of male embarrassment. “Have some problems out there? Your mother was saying –”

  “Why? You going to solve them for me? Arrest that bit . . . ” she swallowed the word, “. . . reporter for tripping me and then accusing me of hitting her.”

  Trenton smiled, scratched his bald head and said, “I don’t think so. My
mama didn’t raise no fool.”

  “The implication being?”

  His hands shot up. “Hey, I didn’t mean anything about you.”

  “We’ve been having a good talk with your mother,” Detective Warren took over, peering closely at her through his narrow eyes and delicate lenses, “and we’d like to continue that discussion with you.”

  He retrieved his notebook from the island. She noticed a page full of ink.

  “Just what have you been discussing? No!” Gwyn changed tack. “I don’t want to know. I don’t care. I want the two of you out of here now. Go join your friends.”

  “We think that sitting down with these two detectives is not a bad idea. At least right now.” The richly resonant voice of George Delagopolis, Mommsa’s attorney, preceded his emergence from the kitchen nook by about two seconds. No secret where the Greek stashed a good deal of his money. His belly extended at least eighteen inches beyond the rest of him. An epicurean who took at least three cruises a year sponsored by Gourmet magazine. His cologne pulled into port next. Duty free, but nothing cheap about that, either; even in her dudgeon, Gwyn had to admit it was pleasant.

  “You told me to call him,” Mommsa said preemptively.

  Gwyn didn’t know whether to express relief over Delagopolis’ richly tanned presence, or frustration over her inability to deep-six ebony and ivory.

  “So let’s all sit down,” Delagopolis suggested.

  “Yes, let’s do,” Mommsa said. “Come, the great room,” she added, blossoming into her role as a host.

  Gwyn hadn’t seen her this upbeat in years.

  Then Mommsa really turned on the charm by asking her, “Are you sure you don’t want any –”

  “Yeah, give me the cake,” Gwyn sighed. “Small piece, okay?” Better to roll over when Mommsa got like this.

  Her mother led them into the great room past her eclectic collection of sculpture, paintings, ceramics, and assorted objets d’art clustered here, there, and everywhere in the cavernous space. Gwyn was so narrowly focused on keeping her story—correction: stories—straight that she breezed right past a hand-blown glass bowl that formed a new centerpiece for Mommsa’s long-treasured, leaf-shaped, ancient Peruvian table.

  Feeling no more generous than the exigencies required, Gwyn commandeered the lounger. Might as well look relaxed while she ate the wee sliver of cake.

  The two detectives sat side by side on a twenty-thousand dollar custom-made white leather couch. A herd of prized Herefords had died for that one.

  Mommsa propped herself up against the warehouse-size hearth, resting a wrist on a mahogany beam that bore an array of framed photos, even pausing to gaze lovingly at a picture of John Appleton himself. Whenever appearances might prove important, Mommsa brought it out and stared at it, once telling Gwyn, “It’s what grieving widows do, dear.” She must have read it in a book.

  Gwyn wanted to turn the picture of the vicious creep toward the wall. She resisted the urge. A display of outright aggression toward the dubiously departed would only make the detectives more suspicious. If that was possible.

  Delagopolis lowered himself into a Mayan print armchair so large and lush that it appeared to swallow most of his considerable size. He cleared his throat.

  Just as Gwyn thought they were about to commence with this anxious, awkward session, out walked a doughy-faced man in paint-spattered carpenter pants and sweatshirt. In his big round glasses, eyes rolling left-right-center, he looked dizzy.

  “Mommsa, who—”

  “Huffy Pants,” she said merrily, her mood up-swing having now been sustained for an unprecedented period this afternoon, “meet my daughter, Gwyneth.”

  “Gwyn,” Gwyn corrected.

  “Yes,” Delagopolis jumped in, perhaps sensing a mother-daughter squabble like the ones he’d witnessed in the past. “Gwyn, this is Ralph Biggers.”

  Gwyn nodded. “The contractor, right.”

  Huffy Pants, still looking like he’d landed on Pluto, and about as competent appearing as Gwyn figured after contacting the California Contractors Board yesterday and finding that he wasn’t licensed, stood near Mommsa, who turned her most loving gaze from the late John Appleton to—please, Mommsa, say it ain’t so—the latest man in her life?

  In his big round glasses, also flecked liberally with paint, Huffy Pants resembled a strangely threatening version of Mr. Magoo. He pulled on his nose, thrust his hands into his pockets, jingled loose change for no more than a second before yanking them out, in tandem, to adjust his glasses. He was such a herky-jerky bundle of nerves that the detectives, Delagopolis, Gwyn and Mommsa, all stared in awe.

  Huffy Pants noticed this, tried to drape a casual hand on the shelf full of family photos, and knocked one of Gwyn to the floor. Somehow, the glass frame didn’t shatter.

  He picked it up hurriedly, fumbled it, almost dropped it again.

  “Give that to me.” Mommsa snatched the frame out of his hands and—Gwyn would have sworn this was true—almost hit him on the head with it.

  “Please sit down, Mr. Biggers,” Trenton said. “You’re making us all nervous.”

  Gwyn turned away in disgust. Huffy Pants didn’t look like he could hammer a nail through a stick of butter, much less double the size of Mommsa’s studio. Where did she find them? She lives in Santa Barbara and hires absolute bottom feeders.

  Huffy Pants settled on a seat near Mommsa.

  Trenton shifted toward Gwyn. “I got to ask you this,” he said without a hint of the apology a simple reading of his words might convey. “Where were you last night around—”

  “At home in bed.”

  “Sorry, but I got to ask this, too. Were you alone again?”

  Gwyn thought about her answer. Last time she’d said it was none of their business, but since then they’d demonstrated that her sequestered sleeping routine was very much their business.

  “Go ahead, tell them,” Delagopolis advised.

  “Alone.”

  “That’s too bad,” Trenton said.

  “Really? ‘Too bad?’ Are you suggesting that I take a man to bed to make your job a little easier?”

  Delagopolis suggested she calm down; it only rankled her more to know he was right.

  “It’s not our job you’d be making easier.” Trenton sounded tired.

  “How was your date with Doctor Harken?” Warren said as he annoyed the barrel of his Cross pen.

  “You were watching?”

  “Just for a little bit.”

  “Fun. Okay? Surf’s up, we had a great time. So maybe I’ll have that alibi next time.”

  Oops. Poor choice of words.

  “An alibi is only part of the answer,” Warren replied.

  “What’s the other part?”

  “You tell me. How is it that Simmonds ends up dead in the same dumpster where he threw his wife?”

  “Coincidence?” But even Gwyn felt the joke losing air before she could get it out.

  “Not too many people know those details, Gwyn.” He tapped his notebook with his pen.

  “Oh, come on, lots of people know. The neighbor who called 911 and everyone she talked to. His wife’s family, everyone she told, they told. The operator, cops, EMTs. How about the media? The judge, probation officer. Bailiffs, court stenographer—”

  Warren put up his hand to stop her.

  “No,” she insisted. “You know it’s true. You could fill Our Lady of Angels . . . ” –L.A.’s new, huge cathedral—“. . . with the people who know about that dumpster.”

  “Okay, so let’s narrow it down then,” said Warren. “Who else, other than you, has a history of being closely associated with this kind of violent crime?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe you’d better herd them over to the confessional for that one.”

  Delagopolis cracked a large smile.

  Warren’s lips tightened almost imperceptibly. “You’re Catholic, right, Gwyn? Doing penance with your work? Feel like—”

  “Spare me. I’m a lap
sed Catholic, okay? And no, I’m not doing penance and I don’t feel like confessing, not to you or to anyone else. That’s what you were going to say, right? That’s totally, totally lame.”

  Delagopolis didn’t give Warren a second of dead air before jumping in.

  “She’s right. This is ridiculous. If you have something substantive to say, say it. Otherwise, this is a waste of my client’s time.”

  Warren never so much as glanced at Delagopolis. “Now what I find interesting, Gwyn, is that you didn’t say there was nothing to confess, just that you didn’t feel like doing it.”

  “Don’t read too much into that inkblot, you’ll get all smudged.”

  At that moment Warren’s phone rang, but he didn’t answer it, not right away. He stared at Gwyn, who had to force herself not to squirm. Then he pulled out his cell and walked back toward the kitchen.

  Delagopolis pushed himself up out of that plush armchair and strolled over to the window, muttering, “This is bullshit,” loud enough for everyone to hear.

  “I’ve got an appointment. Mind if I go?” Huffy Pants asked Trenton.

  “You’re mistaking me for someone who cares. What’s up with you anyway, Pants?” Even Trenton had started using the nickname, and in the tradition of cops everywhere had shrunk it right down to size. “You don’t have a contractor’s license. You don’t even have a driver’s license.”

  Before Pants could respond, Warren walked back in, scratching a final note on his pad before turning his attention to Pants as well. “My partner’s right,” he said. “What kind of contractor are you?”

  “Odd jobs,” Pants said with a shrug. ”Some big ones.”

  “You’re not doing this reno,” Trenton jumped back in. “You may be building something with Joanna there, but it’s not a studio.”

  Delagopolis rolled his eyes, but Mommsa moved next to Pants, put her arms around him, and said in a voice that could have frozen squid, “He’s my lover.”