Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  Little insomnia never killed a guy.

  Barr had been turned away the whole time, but evidently he’d been listening.

  “Boyfriend, huh?” A hiss came out of Barr. She supposed it was a laugh, or as near to one as he could manage.

  “You ever hear from Vickie?” Best way to take their interest off you was to put it on them.

  His hat moved back and forth. “But I’ve got a helluva love life. They don’t know what I look like on the Net, so I tell them I look like Jude Law. You wouldn’t believe the babes coming after me in cyber-land. I got one says she’s a Julia Roberts look-alike. Even gets gigs doing Julia.”

  “Maybe she’s playing the same game you’re playing.”

  That hiss of air again. “Yeah, maybe you’re right.” Except this time he sounded deflated, and she wished she hadn’t said it. He went on, “Maybe none of us is what we seem. Is that what you’re saying? So are you something that you’re not?”

  “Do you miss Vickie?” Deflecting his question again.

  “About as much as I’ll miss these cops. They’re barking up the wrong tree if they think you’re the one doing all these killings.” Barr’s hat, all she could see of his head, nodded in the direction of her studio where Trenton had disappeared. “You think they’re gonna catch this guy?”

  “Maybe it’s a woman.”

  “A pissed-off wife?”

  “Could be.”

  Trenton strolled out the door and asked Gwyn to walk down the hall with him. They wandered toward the emergency exit, where the female officer had posted herself.

  “That poem,” Trenton said, “it sound the same to you as the other ones?” He surprised her by asking her opinion, and she sensed a trap.

  “I thought it did, but I haven’t made a study of them.”

  “I agree. It sounds just like them.” He paused.

  “So?”

  “So let me put it this way. How long you had your Selectric typewriter in there?”

  “Forever, if it’s that important for you to know. Why?”

  He stared two beats longer, leaned in so the female officer couldn’t hear him, and draped his arm around her shoulder, a gesture that actually felt less friendly than a stone fence.

  “Here’s why, Ms. Sanders. Those other poems were all typed on a Selectric. And now that we’ve found a poem cut into your painting, it’s just interesting that the same kind of typewriter is sitting about two feet away.”

  She shrugged off his arm. “So check the friggin’ type on those poems with my typewriter. It’s not going to match. Not exactly.”

  “Funny you should know that.”

  “Everyone who’s ever read a detective novel knows that.”

  He shook his head. “That’s for standard typewriters. See . . . ” he held up a clear plastic evidence bag with a Selectric ball in it, “. . . you type out your poem with this thing, and then you throw it away and stick a new ball on. They’re cheap enough, and now you’ve got an untraceable poem. Like I said, it’s funny you should know that.”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “Then why does this one look like it’s hardly ever been used?”

  “Because it’s hardly ever been used.”

  “When was the last time?”

  “I don’t know. A few months ago? I use my laptop for everything but envelopes.” She shook her head in disbelief and wished like hell Delagopolis’ associate would show. Also wished she’d said a little less to Trenton. What’s with my mouth, she wondered. It’s like it’s got a mind of its own.

  Trenton put the evidence bag in his pocket. “You mind waiting a few more minutes?”

  “I’d rather not. If I leave, are you going to arrest me?”

  “You planning on leaving town?”

  “No, I’m under a lot of pressure to keep my group going.”

  “So you’re gonna do that?”

  “I don’t have much choice, do I? Can I leave by the emergency exit?”

  “Nope, it’s off limits because of the investigation. You’re gonna have to go out the front by the reporters. Do you some good.” He turned to the female cop watching the emergency exit and said, “Don’t let her pass,” before walking over to Barr and telling him he was free to go.

  As soon as Gwyn grabbed her bag and opened the front door of the brewery, a camera light came on. Then another and another. Barr, trailing a few feet behind, swore under his breath. She couldn’t blame him. Every carnival has a freak show, and he must have known that as far as these reporters were concerned, he’d been sent straight over from central casting.

  Gwyn had the urge to cover her head with her big shoulder bag, but feared she’d look like one of Pants’ mobster friends. In a very short time she’d come to loathe reporters, especially this one.

  “Gwyn, you major in poetry?” Blanche Gable asked as they drew closer.

  “Hey, Gwyn, got a new boyfriend?” Not Blanche, some guy. In fact, Blanche surprised her by telling him to “fuck off.”

  “Took the words right out of my mouth,” Barr said as they eased past the lights and leering lenses. He started down the sidewalk to his car.

  “See you,” Gwyn said to him. An easy kindness. She couldn’t imagine having his scars and keeping her composure in front of these cameras. She could barely keep it together as it was, and had grown so distracted by the lights and non-stop questions that she couldn’t place where she’d parked her car.

  A horn sounded, and she spotted Hark’s shiny black Saab speeding down the street. He pulled up and threw open the passenger door. She pushed past the reporters and hurled herself on to the seat, trailed by camera lights and snatches of horribly uncomfortable questions: “. . . kill your father . . . ” “. . . deadly snakes . . . ” “. . . weird pattern of . . . ”

  “Thanks,” she gasped.

  “You get a chance to look at your car?” Hark floored the accelerator.

  “No, why?”

  “Someone flattened your front tires. An old reporter’s trick.”

  “I’m glad you were there, but they might have got your face.”

  “Don’t worry about that.”

  “Next they’ll have some wicked nickname for me, The Poetess of Pain, and you’ll be my paramour.”

  “If I’m lucky.”

  She hadn’t meant it literally, more an imagining of what the media would make of them; but there was no simple route back to the moment before, so she changed the subject. “I’m sure this’ll make the eleven o’clock news. You see any of the early shows today?” Hoping he hadn’t, but knowing that by now he must have heard that she was a major suspect.

  And he’s here anyway. So relax.

  “Let’s just say swearing at a reporter and pushing her after she tries to help you up are not advisable in the future.”

  “She tripped me.”

  “Naturally. They didn’t show that. Television news is such . . . ” he shook his head, “. . . utter crap. I’ve studied a lot of killers, and you’re no killer.”

  Gwyn experienced a clear sense of relief, but could Hark’s experience as a forensic psychiatrist really leave him that certain she was innocent? She’d sure wonder about him, if the situation were reversed.

  “Do you want to go to your place?” Hark asked.

  “I think so. It’s private. Or I hope it is.”

  She gave him directions to her condo and turned to the passenger window, gazed out at Saturday night L.A., a swanky stream of headlights and streetlights, klieg lights, and hazy starlight.

  Hark turned down Santa Monica Boulevard, wide as a football field with towering palms rising all along the median. “You should hire someone to help you with the p-r. Television news is no place for the uninitiated.”

  “Maybe I should.”

  “I did after Sofia died. I had to.”

  She pointed to the driveway for her parking garage—thankfully, amazingly, no sign of the media—and he pulled up to the keypad. She told him the numerical code, and the me
tal door rolled open.

  When it closed behind them, she felt delivered, in every sense of the word, from the anguish of the past few hours.

  He found the visitor parking without her help, and they took the elevator to the third floor.

  Her first thought after welcoming him inside was that she was so glad she’d cleaned up.

  Two of her famous mother’s masks formed the centerpiece attraction on the three-quarter wall they faced coming in, which also opened on either end to the kitchen and dining area. A Dali painting the size of a large postcard hung less obtrusively on the wall to their right. It could be worth a small fortune, or hardly anything at all. So much work had been churned out in Dali’s name during his last decades, that art historians were still trying to sort out the master’s hand from those of his subordinates. Regardless, she liked the image of the melting object, which Hark was now studying.

  “Is that a spoon, or a phone?” he asked.

  “Who knows? A glass of wine?“

  “No, it’s some kind of—”

  “I mean would you like a—”

  “Oh, yeah,” he laughed. “Sure, I would. Very much.”

  “I’ve got some pinot noir open, or I could—”

  “That’d be great.”

  He moved over to Mommsa’s masks as Gwyn headed into the kitchen. “She’s amazing,” he called from the other side of the dividing wall.

  “That she is,” Gwyn said absently as she poured the wine.

  She took a sip as he came around the corner. “I really needed this.”

  “Me, too,” he said as she handed him a glass.

  “What a day.” She shook her head, smiling now that she’d survived it, and led him out to the balcony.

  They leaned against the railing and looked out at the ocean, a vast blanket of darkness. A breeze ruffled their hair. The light was sparse as winter sparrows, but she liked glancing at him in these shadows.

  She took a greedy mouthful, hungry for the soothing effects of the vino, and noted that two-thirds of her glass was already gone. She always remained conscious of her consumption, no matter how moderate, because of John Appleton. She’d never let herself become an alcoholic, if only to spite the miserable, booze and blood-soaked memory of her stepfather.

  When they’d pulled up to the garage, there was something she’d wanted to ask Hark. What was it? Before her thoughts could travel one more step back, he turned to her, lifted the glass from her hand, and set it on a balcony table where his own now rested. Then he took her face in his warm hands and kissed her. The wine on his lips tasted even better than it had from the glass.

  Her hands climbed hungrily up his back, squeezing the strong muscles along both sides of his spine. His explorations proved bolder, and she did nothing to stop him when he caressed her bottom. Nothing when his hands took hold of the back of her thighs and his lips found her neck. Nothing when he unbuttoned her top and kissed the shallow valley between her breasts. And nothing at all when he unbuckled her belt and unhooked her jeans. Only when his fingers slipped inside her panties did she object, and it wasn’t to his touch.

  Taking his hand, she led him to her bedroom and pressed him back on to a fluffy white comforter. She stood before him with her zipper open, panties blinking, and smiled. Then she turned away to slip off her top and unhook her bra, a shock of shyness unbraiding in that delicious moment. As the straps slid down her arms, an intense wave of warmth rose from her belly to her breasts. But the pleasure that jellied her legs came when Hark knelt behind her and gently peeled off the last of her clothes.

  Only later, when they lay next to each other still touching, exploring gently, did it occur to her that she’d let her body run away with her brain. A strange time to strike up a romance, she thought.

  Maybe not so strange, she told herself a moment later. People are always ending up in each other’s arms in extreme circumstances. It’s so common it’s almost a cliché. She remembered all the wartime romances she’d heard about, the men and women who reached out as bombs fell and tanks rumbled down their darkened streets.

  But she also wondered about the strength of those relationships, if they could endure the quiet rigors of peace, or if they were merely a short-term survival tool of the species, a means of defying the imminence of death with the possibility of new life.

  She’d wonder about this and a great deal more after recalling where she and Hark had left their conversation at the parking garage gate. “Why did you have to hire a p-r firm after Sofia died?”

  “What?” He sounded dreamy, drenched in the hormonal soup of sex.

  “Earlier, in the car, you said you had to hire a publicity –”

  “That? Right, okay.” He shifted on to his side. “Someone in L.A.P.D. was leaking stuff to the media that Sofia had died under ‘strange circumstances.’ There was nothing strange about it at all. She was surfing and hit her head on a submerged rock and drowned after suffering an acute subdural hematoma.”

  Gwyn rolled on to her hip to face him. “So what could they make of that?”

  “They tried to make a lot of it. I had just lost my wife, and a detective actually told me, point blank, that she could just as easily have been hit in the head with a rock and dropped in the ocean. It was absurd, something right out of a comic book, but that’s what he said. They impounded my boat for weeks and went through everything we owned, so I can really feel for what you’re going through.”

  This was painful to hear, and its effect only grew worse when he picked up the story. “The media got hold of the fact I was inheriting Sofia’s money, which was, well, a lot, and that her life was insured in the five-million-dollar range. You can imagine the fun they had with that.”

  Gwyn listened with a growing sense of foreboding.

  “Anyway, that’s why I hired a p-r company, and it’s paying off. Look at that Times piece. It’s a lot better than any of the press I got after Sofia died, although to give the devil his due, the Times never crucified me. It was mostly TV. One of them even had what they called a ‘Doc Watch.’ They’d catch me on camera every time I went surfing and then badger me with questions. It was pretty much what you’re going through.”

  Soul mates, she thought bitterly, because I’m a murder suspect, too? She rolled over, trying to let sleep take her away from Hark’s unnerving revelations. She wanted her limbs to turn to liquid, to fall by her sides and flow into sleep with the dreamy ease of a lazy river. But this was not a night for the soft rewards of untroubled rest. This was a night for sleep that came in spurts that seemed like seconds, before awakening with a panicky pulse of irrational fear.

  Hark, however, lay on his back all through the night with his arms by his sides. Corpse pose, that’s what they called it in yoga. She wished she hadn’t thought of that, but every image of this long night formed a cavalcade of gruesome death: Croce, Santini, Kruber, Simmonds, and poor Sofia Harken, a woman she’d only glimpsed in a painting and photograph.

  Gwyn had gone to bed so late, so exhausted, and here it was, twenty of six, and she couldn’t sleep.

  She crawled out from under the covers, slipped on her robe, and crept out of the room, closing the door quietly, already plotting to squelch the squall of the coffee grinder. Step two would come at her laptop, as it had yesterday morning; but today she wouldn’t bother with the surf cam, though her focus would remain on the waves and their churning, sometimes lethal turbulence.

  She jarred the computer from sleep mode when she planted her warm mug beside the keyboard. Quickly, she Googled, “Sofia Harken’s death” and came up with scores of hits, even though she’d died nine years ago.

  What Hark had told Gwyn was accurate enough, insofar as it went; but he hadn’t revealed that the criminal inquiry led to a grand jury taking testimony in the case. Or that after it declined to indict him for murder, the prosecutor dismissed the jurors, saying they’d been “too susceptible to the sophisticated, charming manner of a man many of us believe is a killer.”

&nbs
p; An editorial writer for the Pasadena Star-News noted in a column headlined, “Why Not?” that Harken had never sued for libel. “It’s as if the District Attorney baited him openly in the hope that he would sue, that the evidence detectives had accumulated would finally find a receptive venue, much as the evidence against OJ Simpson had to wait for a civil trial before it could be heard by an appreciative audience.”

  OJ and Harken? (Already, and quite unconsciously, she’d reverted to using his last name only.) She’d just made love to a man mentioned in the same breath with the thug who’d become the poster boy for spousal abuse? One degree of separation from Simpson? Was that really possible?

  No, she told herself, it can’t be that bad.

  And to read on, it wasn’t that bad. The tenor of the stories changed over the years. A considerable body of opinion had been published arguing that Harken had been defamed. A Los Angeles Times editorial scolded the D.A. for his “intemperate, contemptuous, and politically motivated remarks.”

  Surfer magazine had chimed in with a lengthy piece purporting to show that Harken’s story about a rogue wave and a submerged rock at Point Concepcion made perfect sense. As Gwyn knew, it was an all too common tragedy in the surfing community.

  She saw photos of Sofia along with the stories. Really gorgeous. Surfing shots of her had been in great demand for obvious reasons, and one of them showed a young woman more curvaceous than Gwyn. But amid the many Google entries were gossipy accounts from anonymously quoted friends who said Harken had never appeared to grieve his wife’s death. Others claimed the marriage had been in trouble from the start. A maitre d’ at the Newport Yacht Club described a hellacious row that resulted in their temporary expulsion from the premises.

  Bits and pieces of the story came back to Gwyn from years ago, but few of the elements felt familiar, and even these were mixed-up in her memory with the never-ending skein of southern California scandals.

  After nearly an hour, she reached no easy conclusion save this: Harken had followed the lead of other wealthy, influential figures who’d hired high-octane p-r firms after finding themselves under fire. In his case, the move had paid off handsomely. Thanks to spin—or perhaps a skillful presentation of the facts themselves—his public image had been largely sanitized.