Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  Gwyn’s hand flew to her brow, where it appeared necessary to keep her head from falling to the floor. “Is this why you wanted me to meet him? For Chrissakes, why didn’t you just say, ‘I’ve got a new boyfriend?’”

  Because you wouldn’t have come.

  A year ago she’d refused to meet anymore of Mommsa’s boyfriends until they’d passed the two-month test. So few ever had that Gwyn figured she’d spare herself the burden of learning new names, or of hearing yet another life story that in classic SoCal fashion managed to blend truth and apocrypha in ways that defied logic by doing irreparable damage to both.

  So her mother—surprise—had resorted to outright manipulation.

  Bad timing, Mommsa, what with the cops and all.

  “So that’s it?” Trenton said. “You two are an item?” He sounded incredulous too.

  Say what you will about her nutbar nature, Mommsa was an attractive, wealthy, middle-aged woman who, according to the accounts she’d impressed upon Gwyn—despite her daughter’s stringent protests—was great in bed.

  Pants, on the other hand, looked like a turnip halfway to the stew pot.

  Mommsa answered Trenton by nuzzling Pants’ ear.

  The detective looked like Gwyn felt, about to be sick. But what could he say? Gwyn soon found out.

  “You know he’s got a rap sheet, Miss Appleton?”

  “Really? Anything exciting?”

  “Exciting? Is that what you said?” Warren now took over completely for his partner. “Let’s start with his name, his real name. It’s not Ralph Biggers. It’s Enrico Marchesata, or ‘Hank the Shank’ as he’s known to the Chicago Task Force on Organized Crime. He’s a ‘made’ member of the Calabrese crime family who disappeared from the Windy City about a year ago, but not without leaving quite a record.” Warren began to read directly from his notepad. “1989, eight charges of aggravated assault and battery. Both victims hospitalized after being beaten unconscious with a baseball bat.”

  “It was a bar fight, that’s all,” Pants said to Mommsa.

  “1992, grand auto theft.”

  “Dismissed,” Pants replied.

  “1995, murder.”

  “Not guilty.”

  “Chief witness disappeared,” Warren added.

  Gwyn no longer needed a hand to hold up her head: these bulletins were doing the job for her. The list continued, but the murder charge was the headline. After that it was all arson for hire and illegal gaming.

  “A bookie,” Trenton interjected.

  “I took some bets.”

  “For the mob,” Trenton said.

  Pants fidgeted. “They seemed like nice guys to me.”

  “I object to all of this,” Delagopolis interceded. “You’re denigrating my client’s significant other, and if I didn’t know better, I’d think that was beneath the Los Angeles Police Department.”

  Let them go on, Gwyn wanted to argue. She wished there had been background checks on all the losers in Mommsa’s life, starting with the late John Appleton himself.

  “So what are you doing out here?” Warren’s attention had never strayed from Pants.

  “Chicago’s cold.” Pants feigned a shiver. “I like the sunshine.”

  Trenton rose to leave, and Warren snapped his notebook shut. They’d had enough.

  “Hold on,” Gwyn said. “I’m stopping my group, at least for the time being. We can’t expect these guys to show up every Wednesday night knowing that someone’s picking them off one by one.”

  “Actually,” Warren said, “we want it to continue. And so does the D.A. The judges agree. None of your men gets to skip their obligation. None of them gets away without showing up, unless they’re voluntary. Do you have any of those?”

  “You know I don’t, but it’s my decision if the group goes on, and I’m canceling it.”

  “I wouldn’t do that,” Warren said. “Right now it’s critical to our investigation that it continue, and if you’re as innocent as you want us to believe, you’ll keep it going.”

  “I don’t get it. What do you get out of the group?”

  “It’s not something I can discuss. You’re going to have to trust us. We’ll have that church covered for blocks around.”

  “What do we get in return?” Delagopolis demanded.

  “A presumption of innocence. We can make it a lot tougher for your client than we have, and you know it.”

  “Wait just a second,” Gwyn said. “How am I supposed to run it? Would you listen to me if you heard I was the big suspect? These guys are gonna be looking at me wondering if they’re next.”

  “We’ll have two uniformed officers stationed right outside the door where every one of your guys will see them when they show up,” Warren said. “The two hours they spend in your group will be the safest part of their week. Nobody’s getting murdered at the meetings. They know that. And they know the killer already knows who they are. There’s no mystery there.”

  “Only mystery,” Trenton said as he adjusted his jacket, “is in this room.”

  He and Warren stepped out to the porch and walked down the driveway without acknowledging Blanche Gable’s incessant questions or Cassie Cannon’s ineffectual attempts to catch a stray comment.

  Gwyn, Mommsa, and Delagopolis watched from the front window as the detectives sealed themselves in their unmarked car and drove away. Pants stretched out on the white couch.

  “They don’t have anything on you,” Delagopolis said to Gwyn as he moved back over to the Mayan print armchair and eased himself down. “That’s what we can conclude from today. But that doesn’t mean they can’t hold you as a material witness. That’s what he was saying when he talked about making it a lot harder for you.”

  “Their whole line of inquiry’s a major stretch, as far as I’m concerned.” Gwyn’s words did a fair job of hiding her panic.

  “Look at it from their standpoint,” Delagopolis said. “Even if they can’t link you to these murders with any hard evidence, you’re still a witness in a very peculiar killing twenty-three years ago, a retribution murder, as far as they’re concerned, just like the ones they’re looking at now.”

  “But they couldn’t prove anything back then.”

  “They don’t have to prove anything to throw you in jail as a material witness. The presumption would be that you know something because you were there, and a lot of judges are going to see it their way. And then even I would have a hard time arguing that you’re not a flight risk. The prosecutors are going to tell the judge in chamber that as long as you’re in jail, these men are safe. We might find ourselves having to wait for the killer to strike again. Then I could definitely get you out.”

  “What if he doesn’t kill anyone when I’m in jail?”

  Delagopolis looked at her closely. “Tell me you’re not really worried about that.”

  “But I am.”

  “Now that’s what worries me.”

  “So you’re saying the group goes on or they’re going to throw me in jail as a material witness?”

  “That’s a very real possibility.”

  Gwyn grabbed her shoulder bag. “I’m getting out of here.”

  “I’ll walk you to your car.”

  As soon as they stepped on to the porch, that wire-haired harridan started in on her again, shouting from the road, “You do it, Gwyn? You murder Chuckie Simmonds? Ricky Santini? How about Danny Kruber?

  Chuckie? Ricky? Danny? She’d just made three wife beaters sound like a trio of Care Bears.

  “We have no comment,” Delagopolis said as the inquisition persisted all the way to Gwyn’s car.

  As she eased behind the wheel, Cassie Cannon hollered a question that included a reference to snakes, for God’s sakes, but Gwyn fired up her engine and missed the rest of it. She wasn’t grieving the loss.

  Cannon was already lighting a cigarette as Gwyn pulled away. Neither reporter appeared prepared to give chase, so she headed for her favorite taco stand, which roosted near the freeway on the
outskirts of town.

  Free at last. Free at last. Thank God almighty, I’m free at last.

  By the time she reached the northern fringe of L.A., her few good spirits had faded and she found herself dwelling on the darker events of the day. Another group member had been murdered, and the detectives were closing in on her. Plus, Mommsa hadn’t appeared the least put-out to hear that she was romancing a man named “Hank the Shank.” Maybe it wasn’t news to her.

  But what really made Gwyn’s stomach roll as she changed lanes was the memory of her stepfather’s grisly death twenty-three years ago. That horrifying day at their old summer home in the Sierras had shadowed every moment of her life, regardless of how grand or sweetly inconsequential.

  As she settled back in the middle lane, she smelled the pine trees and trail dust in the mountains once again, the mold in the damp root cellar, and felt the sun on her back as she did in the bright seconds before her world had blackened forever. She’d found Mommsa so alone, unmoving for hours, stricken with terror.

  What he’d done to her. What he’d done.

  Everything from that day forward, from the bastard’s death to this solitary drive, had been a haunting as cold as the worst crime. She could speak with certainty of this, and in her most wrenching silences she still did, for Gwyn Sanders knew the harsh truth of murder. It had a hard heart, no matter the cause, no matter the crimes that made it breathe. A hard heart. There was life, and in the snuff of a second there was death. No going back, except in memory, and you were never free of its iron arms, however rusty with age. They were always reaching out, turning you around, making you face the past. Making you look into its dusty, cracked mirror at the corrosive cruelty that was yours and yours alone.

  At ten after nine she pulled up in front of the old brewery building. She figured she could get in a good two hours of studio time, more tomorrow, if her mood didn’t drive her mad.

  The entrance light cast its jaundiced glow, and her skin appeared yellow and sickly as she pressed her shoulder into the huge, heavy wooden door. After closing it back up, a loud creak made her stiffen, and she forced herself to remember that the place always felt a little eerie after dark.

  Butt-shaking surf music throbbed from deep inside the building. Got to be a new tenant, she thought. Hadn’t heard that kind of reverb before, like the walls themselves were having a panic attack.

  “No worries,” she whispered to herself. Some artist needs the mood music.

  She stepped carefully across the mine field of protruding pipes to the foot of the stairs and flicked a light switch. A single caged ceiling bulb on the landing flickered and went dark, leaving the climb as dim as the balcony in Phantom of the Opera. She gripped the chilly steel handrail and felt the heavily amped music buzzing her palm.

  Her studio door opened easily with her skeleton key, almost as if it hadn’t been locked. But she didn’t notice because she was so intent on switching on the lights. Then she turned the key’s inside twin to lock back up, squeezing the tarnished metal so hard she had to wipe the sweat from her fingers.

  She stood there staring at the frosted glass in the top half of the door, seeing, as she never had before, how easily an angry man could break it, reach in, and throw the lock.

  Stop spooking yourself. You’ve been working up here for years, she added, and the worst you’ve ever had to put up with was loud music.

  But three guys in her group had been murdered, and she’d been publicly identified as suspect number one. That left some furious people out there: brothers, fathers, even wives. Sad to say, they were the ones posting bail most of the time.

  She pulled pepper spray out of her shoulder pack and placed it on the table next to her easel.

  Feel better?

  Not really. She wanted a gun, even though she’d told herself many times that she’d never use one again.

  She turned on the CD player, Bach—she needed soothing—and walked around a corner to a dented aluminum coat stand where she kept her smocks. It stood near a manikin she’d nicknamed “Claire,” which now wore Mommsa’s prototype for the Touch Wood series. The mask had made her feel creepy right from the start, which she suspected was the real reason Mommsa had given it to her.

  “You’re so nurturing,” she’d wanted to say to Mommsa at the time. Instead, she’d put it on poor Claire and stashed the ghastly creation over by an old commercial dumbwaiter so she wouldn’t have to look at its disturbing features when she worked. One of these days she was going to chuck the damn mask in the mini-elevator and hit “Down.”

  As she walked over to her easel to look at her painting in progress, she pulled on her most colorfully spattered smock. She took a moment to study the simple bright acrylic lines she’d used to evoke the sloping back of a powerful beast that could have been a starkly imagined panther, or the more frightening specter of her own personal griffin.

  This painting had made her uncomfortable from the start. Your own work can do that. No, she corrected herself, your best work can do that.

  As she settled into the psychic DMZ that slouched between pride and panic, she saw that tiny, precise words had been scratched onto the lower left hand corner of the canvas:

  Just Desserts, Take Three

  “Your work gets easier

  by the day,

  as I send each man

  on his well-earned way.

  Who will be next?

  you might well ask.

  Will your own death

  be the final task?”

  She stiffened, fearful of looking around, at what she might find lurking in her studio. But her eyes did shift, with great trepidation, and their reward left her weaker: a scalpel lay at the base of her easel. She looked at the scratchy letters on her painting and saw that the blade had done the damage.

  She grabbed the steel handle, scared that the person who’d defaced her work would reach from the shadows and turn it on her.

  The scalpel was like the one her mother used to eke out the most delicate details in wood, and for good reason: Mommsa had given it to her to trim canvases. Then a new fear struck: Are the cops going to think I did this?

  Screw that.

  She rooted through her shoulder bag and found Detective Warren’s crumpled card. Her fingers flew over the dial pad, but for all her speed of purpose she had to leave a message.

  She stared at the poem, as unbalanced as she’d felt on her very first surfboard. At least the scratches had not ruined her painting. She thought about this even then, how the scalpel could have been used to slash up the entire canvas, all of her work. All of her –

  Are you mad? Call 911! Get the hell out of here!

  As she picked up the phone again, a single hard footstep startled her from the hallway. A second later its pale twin dragged across the floor.

  Familiar. Frightening.

  Again, the footstep sounded, and this time the dragging drew even closer.

  Barr Onstott. That’s when she’d heard this.

  She put the scalpel back on the easel and grabbed the pepper spray, a far more useful weapon. At the end of the intake Barr had stood at her door, all burn scars and bitterness, and told her he’d never beat another woman because no woman would ever have him again. He’d slammed it shut, rattling the photos on the wall, and limped down the hall.

  Yes, that was the sound.

  Gwyn stared as a hulking shadow appeared behind the frosted glass, and then she heard another rattle and saw the door handle move.

  Chapter 6

  “Barr?”

  No answer. Had she spoken too softly? She took a deep breath, poised to say his name again louder; but the air stilled her voice, as if it had paralyzed her passageways, and she inched toward the door having broken faith with the summoning power of speech. Without admitting her riveting fear, she couldn’t have said why she moved so slowly, only that dread suffused these seconds as a cold draft will flood the floorboards of an old home. It made her every step as chilly as exposed skin.


  She knew there could be no secrets in her movements, that he could see her shifting silhouette through the frosted glass as she could see his frank stillness. With her pepper spray aimed at the figure of his head, she managed to say his name again, and this time he answered.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  She lowered the pepper spray, turned the skeleton key, and threw open the door.

  Barr’s hunched-over posture did not change until his head tilted up, revealing his ruined face by degrees. His appearance grew more disturbing as the accumulated evidence of his injuries mounted, so stark, so extreme, that they felt fresh to her in the worst sort of way.

  For the first time she noticed that he was two or three inches shorter than she. Even his hat didn’t add to his stature; his head appeared compressed by the breathless weight of the felt, as his body was by his bent posture. For a moment, surely no more, she took solace in how he shrank from her; but then she understood that he could be coiled and ready to spring.

  She almost sprayed him, had all she could do to hold back. He wasn’t talking, apologizing, or stepping away. She wanted to flee her studio, the grilling menace of that poem—“Will your own death/be the final task?”—but he stood in her way, his body speaking a language she could not decipher, in a coat large enough to hide a shotgun.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked, still standing two-fisted with the most immediate weapons of urban warfare: pepper spray and cell phone.

  He stared at her from the well of those dark eyes that blinked so rarely; and now, when they did shutter, the hairless lids descended slowly before rising with what appeared to be great effort.

  “Answer me or I’m calling the cops. You have no right to be here.”

  But instead of the phone, she lifted the pepper spray. She didn’t realize this until he grabbed her wrist so fast his scarred hand could have been the flashing tongue of a reptile. “Put it down. Drop it.”