Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  It had helped that he lived in L.A. where even the most notorious scandals have the half-life of cottage cheese, and the competition for headlines, no matter how shocking, knows no season.

  Strong hands settled on her shoulders, almost startling her from the chair. How long had Harken been standing behind her?

  “You scared me,” she said, admitting what would have been apparent to all but the dead.

  He didn’t apologize, and as he leaned over she found her gaze freezing on a horrifying headline about his late wife’s death. She braced herself for an outburst of indignance, but instead heard him whisper, “Better relations.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked in the steadiest voice she could muster.

  “The p-r folks. The company’s called Better Relations. They can work miracles for you. They did for me.”

  Chapter 7

  The old brewery was unguarded when Gwyn walked up to the front door later that morning. In honor of Sunday, perhaps, Brahms came lilting down to the main floor soft as a summer shower. Light, so ghostly and portentous the night before, now seeped through the old, unwashed windows and filled in the shadows around the pipes and fixtures. The air itself felt humid enough to bottle and held the slightest hints of salt and yeast.

  From the moment Harken’s hands had landed on her shoulders at the computer, she’d felt uneasy and wanted him to leave so she’d have time alone to sort out her concerns. He’d offered to take her to breakfast, but she’d declined. When he asked what was wrong, she’d told him bluntly that it had made her “uncomfortable” to read about the questions raised by his wife’s death.

  “I can’t go through this again,” he’d said.

  “I’m not asking you to,” she’d replied. “I just need some space.”

  He’d left with a curt good-bye, and after a shower, she’d made her solitary walk to her studio.

  Last night, climbing up these stairs had been cloaked in free-floating anxiety. Now, in the muted coastal light of morning, it held questions about the man she’d made love to twelve hours ago. Nearing the second floor landing, she told herself that it wasn’t that she’d become convinced that he’d murdered his wife, far from it, but that she didn’t know with final certainty that he was above suspicion. The gulf between absolute innocence and even a particle of doubt loomed large because the “subject of interest,” to use the painfully appropriate language of law enforcement, was her “love interest.”

  Most vexing of all was that last night he’d made her feel as if she’d been launched to another planet. Another star cluster, more like it. Way beyond the quaint confines of her clothed body.

  By the time she reached the third floor, her troubling questions had left her thoroughly stirred-up, an irritated state not the least allayed by finding a uniformed officer sitting in front of her studio. Though hardly unexpected in the midst of a major murder investigation, she’d thought she’d be able to pick up her supplies. That didn’t appear likely The L.A.P.D. forensics unit had yellow tape crisscrossed over the door, and the cop wore the gloomy, bored look of a man who’d rather milk king cobra venom in the hot sun than spend an eight hour shift staring at an empty wall.

  “You can’t go in there,” the officer told her in a grim voice when she tried to peer through the frosted glass.

  “I just want to get some of my art supplies,” she said.

  He shook his head, staring right through her.

  “You could get them for me. One trip and we’d be done. That’s my studio.”

  She’d hoped to remove a couple of canvasses, one of her unfinished paintings, and her acrylics, brushes, rags and wipes. Nothing that could possibly be vital to the investigation. Just the odds and ends that cost a small fortune to run out and buy. But she might as well start thumbing her credit cards, to look at Mr. Happiness.

  Wonder what he did to end up here?

  “I know who you are,” the cop said, “and you can’t go in there. They took most of it anyway.” His radio crackled, and he angled the mouthpiece, which was clipped to his shirt, toward his face. “That’s right, she’s here.”

  He listened and signed off without saying a word to her, then continued to stare straight ahead with the blankest eyes.

  Not that she needed an explanation. From the time she’d stepped out of her condo to walk down here, she’d been followed. Trenton and Warren, or whoever served in their stead, weren’t even bothering to be secretive anymore.

  As she made her way back outside, the Triple A tow service she’d called rolled up to her CR-V. Those flat tires needed to be fixed, and she could see this was going to take up a good chunk of the morning. The driver threw her spare on one wheel, and then hauled her and the flat to a garage where a mechanic dropped it onto a steel spindle and went to work. He repeated the process for the second tire until both of them were back on her car and the spare was snug in its carrier.

  Gwyn sat in the CR-V feeling empowered again. The half hour of hoofing it from her condo to her studio had reminded her that L.A. didn’t coddle the carless. At a crosswalk a driver had actually scowled at her.

  She didn’t mind walking. It was having to do it in a city so inhospitable to footed travel that bothered her. She loved hiking, and as a child had experienced freedom for the first time by roaming the mountains surrounding Big Bear, spending her summer days as far from John Appleton as her coltish legs could carry her. Not even her fear of bears and mountain lions and rattlesnakes had curdled her desire for escape. These had been the first steps she’d taken away from him, among the lightest she would ever know; but in the long slow shamble of adolescence they would lead her right back to his door, to the day of his gruesome death.

  A glance in the rear view mirror assured her of constant company for the drive. The ocean came into view, filling her with the sudden desire to surf. She would have loved to lose herself in waves for the rest of the day, but by now the Sunday crowds would be unbearable. And besides, she’d made plans to brunch with Lupe.

  She headed out to East L.A., the decidedly less tony side of town, trusting that the tire repairs would hold as she negotiated surface streets tagged so aggressively with gang graffiti that the concrete stanchions and walls had lost their characteristic gray color.

  As she checked her electronic door locks, Gwyn found herself dreading the group she was scheduled to start in Venice in two weeks, part of the effort to get her case load back up to where it had been at the time of the Croce shooting. But could she really expect herself to conduct the first intake interviews on Thursday? No way. Forget it. Not in the grip of a major career crisis, and that’s precisely where she now found herself, a wrenching realization that came sharply into relief as she drove through these gang-riddled neighborhoods. She didn’t even know if she believed in what she’d been doing for the past eleven years. What are you doing? she’d asked herself over and over since Croce. Shaping men who would shove shotguns into their wives’ mouths? Making them better liars? When Lupe had said that on Wednesday, it had shot straight to the heart of Gwyn’s most festering fear.

  It was absurd to think she could run an effective group in Venice, Pomona –anywhere—with her face appearing every night on television news as the chief suspect in this case. So far, the coverage in the Times, including this morning’s front page story, had been more restrained and run without photos, but she knew the dictates of any disaster, natural or manmade, eventually demanded faces, and for this one, hers would do quite nicely, thank you. Especially if she ever bothered to return the reporters’ calls.

  Not that the Times mattered much to the men she worked with. They weren’t generally newspaper readers or high-end earners. That was one of the two dirty little secrets of her profession. Wife abuse, while putatively a crime that affects all socio-economic classes, confined itself largely to lower income families. It wasn’t hard to figure out why, not when you remembered that financial stress was the major rupture point in most marriages.

  But it was the other d
irty little secret that the broader culture might find more difficult to accept. The women most likely to be beaten, even murdered, were the ones who lacked physical charm.

  The reason less attractive women suffered more abuse wasn’t difficult to divine either. The abusers resented that their own looks, weight, or lack of worldly success had failed to land them a Barrymore, Diaz, or Lucy Liu—no “Angels” for them—the gorgeous women to whom they themselves, with all their male prerogatives, felt entitled. Every time her clients sized up their partners, whom the men saw as little more than extensions of themselves, the batterers were reminded of their own failures. They viewed the women in their lives not as intimates but as insults, and those insults often added up to serious physical injuries.

  Other women in the field, including Gwyn’s absent co-leader, Renata, had noticed the same disturbing income and appearance patterns.

  Gwyn checked her directions to the café, La Cantina, as she turned down a street so thick with parked cars that it was only wide enough to let one vehicle pass at a time. This was the hood where Lupe had grown up, and where her mother still lived. She’d raised eight children here, Lupe the third in line. No husband, not anymore. And that was part of a pattern, too. Although hardly surprising, Gwyn had found that many of the women in the field had personal experience with domestic abuse.

  Lupe’s father had savaged her mamí for Lupe’s entire childhood, but Mamí was not without her growing resources, starting with Lupe and ending with her two older brothers, Hector and Raul.

  When Lupe was fifteen, Hector seventeen, Raul eighteen, the old man had started in on Mamí and found himself piled on by his three oldest kids. It had been unheard of in his world, such an affront to el papá. They beat him almost senseless. Lupe had started studying kick-boxing the year before, had seen her father’s face on every bag she’d ever walloped, and once Papá lay on the floor, she gave him what she’d hoped would be a skull-cracking flying kick, along with a shouted “Kiai!”

  “An altered state,” was how she’d described the near murder of her old man. “And you know,” Lupe had once told Gwyn in a softer voice, “I liked it. You see, that’s what these bastards do, they make you identify with their power, and their power comes from violence. You can’t kid yourself about that. But hey, muchacha, that day we finally did the old cabrón in.”

  No charges were filed, and Papa Miguel, despite swearing vengeance, was forced from the home, thanks to the intervention of a team of female social workers, who gave Lupe her first glimpse of another approach to the problem. He tried coming around, cajoling Mama, but she’d seen how her babies had almost become killers and wanted no more of him.

  A heavily inked homeboy waved Gwyn into a narrow spot behind the café, which looked crowded. The moment she opened her car door, the delicious scent of handmade corn tortillas greeted her.

  Lupe sat at a table near the front window with Constance, her tall, fair-skinned girlfriend from Madrid. Strange couple: Lupe shorter, plumper, all Mexican and Indian blood and Diego Rivera revolutionary; and Constance hailing from the oligarchy that had flourished under Franco and hung on to many of its well-heeled prerogatives under Spain’s democratic rule.

  Hugs and kisses as cool air from the wall-mounted a/c swept over Gwyn’s back. A pitcher of agua de sandía arrived with salsa and a bowl of warm, salty chips.

  “I know my girl, what she likes,” Lupe said as she poured Gwyn a glass of the icy watermelon juice.

  “I’m not going to intrude for long,” Constance said softly. “I just wanted to get something to eat, and then,” finishing with a sexy wink, “I’ll leave you two to talk about the ‘dark side.’”

  Constance had her black hair pulled into pigtails, and her bangs fell in a blunt cut above her eyebrows. She had milk chocolate irises and skin so smooth it looked like it had been stone-buffed. She also gave real meaning to the word grace, and Gwyn had understood why Lupe had fallen for Constance within minutes of meeting her. If she’d been so inclined herself, Constance would have been a wonderful catch.

  “How’s the spring line coming?” she asked. Constance designed skirts and casual dresses for a major sportswear label.

  “You should see the stuff she’s doing.” Lupe shook her hand like it had been burned. “We’re talking hot.”

  “It’s nice having a fan right at home,” Constance said.

  “Hey, I’m not your fan, querida. I’m your fire.”

  After they’d shared a meal of chimichangas and carne asada and gazpacho, Constance kept her promise and left Lupe alone with Gwyn.

  Lupe watched her walk to the back door, then turned and nodded toward the street. “You see your buddy out front?”

  Gwyn nodded. Looked like it might be Warren. Some white guy. “They were out at Mommsa’s yesterday.” She filled in Lupe on the session with the detectives, and quickly summarized the shocks she’d experienced later at her studio.

  “Whoa, slow down, girlfriend. Too much too fast. You say Barr, he came by?”

  “Right. I’m in there, it’s like 9:15, and I hear him limping in the hallway. Then I see him right through the glass. He tries the door. Doesn’t knock.”

  “Doesn’t knock?”

  “You got it.”

  “I’d a kicked his french fried ass till it spit out tater tots. What’s he doing, coming round, spookin’ you?”

  “That’s not even the worst of it.” Gwyn filled her in on the female cop cuffing her, and the arrival of the reporters.

  “That Blanche, was she there?”

  “In the flesh.”

  After telling Lupe about the Selectric typewriter ball, she leaned across the table and took Gwyn’s hand. “How you doing with all this?”

  Gwyn shook her head. “Not great. I hate to admit it, but I don’t miss any of them, and that really bothers me. But Simmonds, Kruber, Santini? They were all A number one batterers. I didn’t see any of them changing.”

  And they’d left behind some strongly simpatico spirits in the group. She thought of Frank Owens right away, the mega-beast who’d beaten and stomped his shrieking, screaming five-year-old on the 911 tape. But even Owens wasn’t unique in his cruelty. Kaj, round and soft and deceptively innocent looking, had pounded his wife to the floor of their rec room and kicked her till she miscarried. Almost killed her. Then there was Sean, who punched his partner, Melissa, through a sliding glass door and left her looking like she’d been forced through a cheese grater. Like Owens, both Kaj and Sean had done time, for all the good it had done them.

  Other violent guys in the group also came to mind, but the only name she shared with Lupe was Jesse’s, and only because her thoughts had turned to suspects and he was such an obvious choice.

  “Skinny guy?” Lupe asked. “Combs his greasy hair back on the sides?”

  “That’s the one. You went over and stood next to him when he threatened to kill Owens.”

  “You tell your detective friends about that?”

  “Yeah, I finally forced myself to call Warren. He acted like I was trying to throw the bloodhounds off my scent. The truth is when I think of Frank Owens getting it next, I can hardly bring myself to care, and that’s what’s really scaring me, Lupe. I realized driving over here that I really am losing faith in what I’m doing.” She rested her elbows on the table, her head in her hands, and spoke without looking up. “I don’t even have hope anymore for some of them, and Owens is a prime example. It’s like I’ve already written him off.” Her eyes rose back to Lupe. “Isn’t that terrible?”

  “Your history? Terrible? Hell no,” Lupe said loud enough to draw the censorious look of a suit-coated father presiding over an after-mass meal with his wife and daughters, all of them in their Sunday best.

  Lupe lowered her voice. “Don’t you go worrying about losing faith, sweetie. I lose it every day, and then I see some guy and he’s really listening, got those wide-open eyes, and I get it back. You will too.”

  Gwyn wasn’t so sure.

  �
�These cops,” Lupe took a sip of water, “they’re saying this group’s still got to go on?”

  “Pretty much. They didn’t leave me much choice. But I’m definitely not starting that group in Venice. It’s insane expecting me to work with these guys. Wednesday’s going to be a circus. I can feel it already.”

  Lupe nodded. “These cops, they’re setting you up for that. I tell you what, I can play lead, you take rhythm this time.”

  “Good idea.”

  Gwyn hadn’t mentioned Harken, his rescue of her outside the brewery, or the strange night they’d spent together. But it all spilled out in a five-minute burst.

  Lupe, being Lupe, asked about the sex first. “Was it really, really good?”

  “Yeah, it was, which made it doubly weird to read all that stuff about him this morning.”

  “You think he’s a killer?”

  “You mean, put a gun to my head and say, ‘If you’re right, you live. You’re wrong, you die?’”

  “Precisamente.”

  Gwyn shook her head. “No.”

  “Then go for it, sister. You got the best goddamned gut of anyone I know. If your gut’s saying he didn’t kill her, then I got to think he didn’t kill her.”

  “But here’s the thing, Lupe. How could I ever be sure?”

  “How you ever gonna be sure about any guy?”

  By the time Gwyn drove back to her condo, Harken had returned and parked himself on the beach right in front of her balcony.

  She couldn’t miss him. Whenever she got home she threw open the sliding glass doors and took in the reassuring sight of the ocean. It was as much a part of her routine as locking the front door, which had received an extra measure of attention today.