Striking Back

by Mark Nykanen

  She hurried to the elevator, slumping against the mirror wall when the doors closed. She remained noticeably drained of energy till it rumbled up to the third floor.

  But at least her home felt like a sanctuary today, unlike yesterday afternoon. Even so, when she opened the door she made a point of looking around before entering. Nothing amiss, only Mommsa’s eerie masks staring back at her.

  Three o’clock came and went without Lupe’s arrival. Gwyn bounced between the balcony and the kitchen, and when she found herself checking her watch for the fourth time in five minutes, she knew her anxiety hadn’t eased much at all. The squawk box came alive at twenty after, launching her across the room.

  She pushed the blue button and heard her old buddy say, “It’s me, muchacha.”

  Gwyn buzzed her friend into the building and waited in the hallway. As soon as the elevator opened she ran to Lupe, hugged her, and started to cry.

  “Sweetie, sweetie, what’s the matter?”

  Gwyn couldn’t answer. She let Lupe lead her back to her condo and settle her on the couch.

  “How’s Mama?” Gwyn managed.

  “A lot better than you, girlfriend. Why you so sad?”

  “I’ll tell you, but it’s about a client—or a supposed client—so it’s totally on the QT.”

  “Of course,” Lupe said.

  Gwyn told her about the meeting with the detectives, and how she’d unmasked Barr. She tried to convey the tension she’d endured on the street, but her efforts couldn’t match her memory.

  Lupe stroked her arm and nodded, her gray streaked curls swaying gently. “This stuff’s getting’ to you. You got to relax, girl. Maybe get away. You think about that?”

  Gwyn said she hadn’t.

  “Maybe you should. And this thing with Jamison—that’s his name?”

  Gwyn nodded.

  “It makes sense. Once I saw him in that fight, I think, this boy, he’s been doing this before. I just didn’t think ‘cop.’”

  “Look, if it’s not him then who’s killing them?”

  “I don’t know. Who you got in mind?” Lupe asked.

  “Jesse.”

  “Did he get bail?”

  “I don’t know. I was going to ask, but things got a little crazy out there in Brentwood.”

  “You chase old Barr down, like,” Lupe pumped her arms up and down, “I’m coming to get you, gringo?”

  Gwyn laughed despite herself. “Pretty much. Look at this.” She pointed to bruises on her legs. “He actually bumped me with the car.

  “He’s a piece of work. That’s crazy.”

  “There’s also that cable creep,” Gwyn said.

  “She’s a piece of work, all right, but how’s she get those big boys in dumpsters, shit like that?”

  “I don’t know, a boyfriend?”

  “You think that girl’s straight?”

  “You don’t?”

  Lupe rocked her hand like a plane tipping wing to wing. “Could fly both ways.”

  “She has said some weird things to me. On the phone she made a point of saying I was real pretty. I mean, she really laid it on thick. Then when she ambushed us on the balcony the last thing I heard her yell was, ‘You’re driving me crazy.’”

  “Not her, please,” Lupe clasped her hands together, looked skyward, “no more crazy lesbian killer headlines.”

  “You want something to drink?” Gwyn stood up, and they migrated into the kitchen and helped themselves to water.

  Lupe leaned against the counter. “Alice, she says in January we can try another group.” Alice Hiyakawa, the regional director. Lupe looked closely at Gwyn. “You don’t want to, do you?”

  “I can’t, Lupe, not anymore. It really hit me in the last few days, I’m finished. It’s been bad since Croce, but now it’s much worse. These murders,” she took a deep drink of water, shook her head as she swallowed, “they’re making me look at these guys like they’re killers. Maybe not all of them, but most of them I’m seeing that way, and I can’t do my job feeling like that. I’m so sorry, Lupe. This must sound really weak to you.”

  Lupe took Gwyn’s hand and massaged it gently. “I seen some bad shit, but I never seen one of my guys blow his wife’s head off. You gotta go easy on yourself, girlfriend.”

  “So you don’t think I’m a quitter?”

  Lupe smiled. “I remember you coming in when you were still in school. ‘Surfer girl,’ that’s what we called you. You know that?”

  Gwyn shook her head.

  “Yeah, we did. I thought, she’s never gonna last, pretty girl like that. What’s this chica know? But girl, I was so wrong. That was a long time ago. You had a good run. Better than most.”

  “I feel guilty. I’ve got all this training, all this experience, and I don’t want to do anything with it.”

  “Oh, baby,” Lupe looked at her closely, “you been seeing the worst shit the world can throw a woman. These men, they love kicking and punching them, hurting them so bad, and you were so tough, baby. I always sent the new girls or guys to you ’cause I knew they’d learn it right. If they weren’t tough, you made ’em tough. You fought the good fight. People saying that all the time, but you really did. No one can say different. You got a right to hold your head high and do what you gotta do.”

  Lupe reached up and caught Gwyn’s tears. Hearing her praise had torn Gwyn open inside, but it was a good hurt, regret and redemption her bittersweet reward. “I love you, Lupe.”

  “I love you too, muchacha.”

  They held each other tightly until Lupe began to sway gently, a lovely maternal motion that lasted for several moments. “What you thinking of, girl?” Lupe let go and Gwyn leaned against the counter.

  “I’m thinking it’s time for me to get serious about my painting, quit blaming a day job for not getting more done in my studio. Lupe?”

  “Yeah, what is it?”

  “I don’t want to lose you because of this.”

  “You mean ’cause you not working with these bad boys? Never gonna happen, girlfriend. We’ve been through it, you and me. We’re sisters forever.”

  Gwyn saw plenty of Hark over the next two days. They spent their evenings cooking simple meals, watching the summer crowds thin, making love, and following coverage of the case. Then Trenton called to say she could have most of her art supplies back. She met him and Warren at her studio an hour and a half later, and while two uniformed officers toted the boxes up the stairs, she asked the detectives if Jesse had made bail.

  “The next day,” Trenton said.

  “He’s been out since then?”

  “Not our idea. We arrest them, the judges let them go.”

  “But you could have told me.”

  “We warned him not to go anywhere near you,” Warren said.

  “That’s real comforting.”

  “Has he been coming around?” Trenton asked.

  She shook her head, worried about the threats you don’t see, and asked if they’d found any prints on the scalpel.

  “None,” Trenton said. “Not even yours.”

  “That doesn’t surprise you, does it? I can’t imagine anyone would be stupid enough to use that thing and leave his prints on it.”

  “Where did you get it?” Warren said.

  Gwyn had to think. She didn’t want to tell them Mommsa had given it to her, not with her mother still a target of their investigation. “I don’t know. It’s been around since I got this studio space. It’d be like asking me where I got one of those brushes over there.”

  “But if we did ask where you got one of them,” Warren’s narrow gaze landed on more than a dozen brushes standing upside down in a glass jar near her newly returned easel, “I’ll bet you’d be able to say, ‘Oh, I probably picked that up at Art Mart, or Fernando’s Fine Art Supplies.’ You’d have some idea. But you don’t seem to be able to name a single place where you’d get a scalpel.”

  “If I used them as much as I use my brushes, I probably could answer you. But I�
�m an artist, not a surgeon, and I don’t know where it came from.” She commended herself for such a quick come-back, but if Warren and Trenton were suitably impressed, they gave no sign of it. “Did you guys find anything in here at all?”

  “Just the poem,” Trenton said.

  She’d found that, but didn’t point this out. A brief silence passed before Warren spoke up. “We’re bringing in Pants for questioning. Did your mother tell you?”

  “No, but we haven’t talked today.”

  “It’ll be on the news tonight. It’s set for tomorrow morning. We wanted to give you some warning.”

  “Thanks. Why are you guys being so nice?”

  Warren looked like he wanted to say something, but didn’t. Trenton shrugged, whatever that was supposed to mean.

  “So you aren’t angry about Jamison?”

  “You haven’t gone public,” Trenton said, “so it’s, ‘No harm, no foul.’”

  “You haven’t charged my mother, so it’s the same thing for me. As long as this Pants interview doesn’t change things.”

  “A stand-off.” That was all Trenton offered before his good-bye smile.

  Gwyn hoped that by bringing in Pants for questioning, the L.A.P.D. was as much as admitting they hadn’t been able to pin the murders on Mommsa or him. Isn’t it a truism, she asked herself, that when cops get desperate enough they’ll alert the media, corral a suspect for questioning, and see what happens when his face flashes before a few million people? Trolling for tips, that’s what it amounts to. Seeing if they can pull anything out of the deep blue sea of suspects. Since her mother’s fate appeared to be tied up with Pants’, Gwyn found herself in the unlikely position of rooting for the goombah.

  With this unsettling thought, she settled down to work on a pencil study. The presence of the detectives and the officers felt like it had fumigated the room of fear, but even so she found her pencils more idle than engaged.

  That night she and Hark sat on her couch channel-surfing. They paused only when KABC began to run copies of Pants’ mug shots from Chicago, dissolving from one grim, full-face photo to another as a gruff-voiced reporter referred to him repeatedly as “Hank the Shank,” and said that according to police sources in the Windy City, the Calabrese crime family had “put him out to pasture.”

  The station then aired video of a much happier looking Pants walking hand-in-hand with Mommsa by her place in Santa Barbara. Rich pastureland, indeed, thought Gwyn.

  “Look, she’s loving it,” Hark said as Mommsa waved the camera crews into her temporary garage studio, and then gestured like a game show model to her macabre masks.

  “Yup, Mommsa’s quite the ham. I’ve got to think she really is innocent if she’s this relaxed. She even looks happy.”

  “Does it bother you that she’s got this thing going with a mobster named ‘Hank the Shank?’”

  “He’s supposed to be retired,” Gwyn said.

  “From a career of beatings, arson and murder.”

  “At least her taste in men is improving.”

  The next morning Hark ducked out about 8:30. After giving him a quick kiss, Gwyn switched on KNZ radio where Cassie Cannon was reporting that Pants and Mommsa were about to enter L.A.P.D. headquarters with his attorney, Joseph Ruefin.

  Worried, she turned on the TV and caught a “live” shot of Pants looking jaunty in a blue-checked sports coat as he, Mommsa, and his bald attorney made their way through the crush of camera crews. Pants even playfully raised a newspaper to cover his face. The headline heralded his appearance here at the Parker Center, and a photo of him could be glimpsed right below the big bold type. Neither he nor Mommsa looked the least concerned.

  Gwyn realized that Mommsa must have coached Pants on how to maximize his fifteen minutes of infamy by parodying a mobster’s media appearance. Meantime, Mommsa had stood aside and was now applauding—yes, she was actually clapping—his snappy little performance before the cameras. Gwyn watched this post-modern pas de deux and thought they might have been made for each other.

  Two hours later, as she was about to leave for her studio, Pants and Mommsa walked out of the Parker Center arm-in-arm. He looked chipper as a hit man with an ice pick. With his attorney hovering right behind him, Pants kicked off an impromptu press conference with this gem.

  “Jesus fucking Christ, I sure hope they nail the bastard that’s killing these guys so they know it’s not me. I told ’em, ‘Yeah, I hate wife beaters, but I’m not whacking ’em.’ I’ll tell you something else, they play fucking hardball with your nuts in this town.”

  A panicky director must have shouted in the cameraman’s earpiece to pull back from the close-up of Pants’ face, because the lens snapped open for a wide shot just as Pants cupped his own jewels and gave them a playful tug, “You know what I mean?” he said, delivered in a broad Chicago accent that demanded nothing in the way of an answer.

  His attorney chimed in with boilerplate about “ending this fishing expedition” while Mommsa remained a smiling, silent presence on the arms of her mobster emeritus.

  When Gwyn finally made it over to her studio, she surprised Blanche Gable and her cameraman, who were lurking by a corner of the old brewery building, deep in its shadows. Gwyn sprinted away before the cameraman could hoist his gear and get rolling, and easily won the footrace to the front door, although she could not outrun Blanche’s screeching demands for an interview.

  Other than escaping the video claws of the cable queen, Gwyn’s studio time proved much less distracting than the hours she’d spent with Hark. She kept remembering the hideous line from the poem that had been etched into her painting—“Will your own death be the final task?”—and found herself wondering how many men would have to die before the killer found himself faced with “the final task?” Would the four he’d killed already be enough? Or would he need to murder six, seven, or all of them before he came after her?

  As she abandoned her studio for the day, scoping the street for Blanche and company, Gwyn felt particularly anxious. Then Hark called her at home to say he’d be caught up with hospital rounds till nine o’clock, so she decided to turn in early by herself.

  Tired? Yes. Sleepy? Apparently not. She was up at 3:00, and again at 4:30.

  Finally, at about 6:00 she drifted into a deep slumber, only to have the phone go off two hours later. Groggy, squinting, she picked up to hear Delagopolis deliver the most disturbing news to date on the Big Bear case. Sheriff Hastings had just called to say that the DNA tests had confirmed that a wedge of her skin had been lodged under one of John Appleton’s fingernails. The evidence sample had been scraped from his body during the original investigation and matched a single strand of her hair lifted from the “crime scene,” as the attorney put it.

  She swore softly, all the energy she had at this hour. “What’s that mean, George? Bottom line?”

  “It places you at the scene of his death, which could build their case for murder. It suggests Appleton struggled with you before he died. It suggests you killed him. It suggests you lied to me.”

  Now she didn’t speak at all, and Delagopolis didn’t press the point. She knew that would come later.

  “You going to be around?” George asked her.

  “I’m not turning fugitive,” she snapped.

  She shuddered as she hung up. Hastings now knew the bastard had clawed her, that she lied when she claimed her stepfather had never touched her. But he never touched her in the sleazy way that Hastings had implied, and in that sense she believed her denial still held true.

  But what Hastings didn’t know was why Mommsa’s second husband had sunk his nails into her daughter’s skin. Gwyn figured that wedge of twenty-three year-old flesh would now form a trailhead that would lead the sheriff directly down the dirt path from their old summer home to the root cellar, the shadowy structure that had appeared in the background of the photo that had run in the Times. It had never been much of a hike from the house to that dark, damp hole in the earth; and it wouldn’t
take much of a leap, either, for a seasoned investigator like Hastings to find the logical link between A and B: insane anger and outright brutality.

  And when he did, all the sordid details about what happened in Big Bear would come out. Cops played the media like maestros, and nothing that juicy would stay secret for long. Not in L.A. She had to talk to Hark before he learned the most horrifying details of her life from a front page spread in the LA Times.

  She dialed his office as she hurried down to her car, impressing the urgency of her call on his assistant. An eternal two minutes later she heard Hark’s welcoming voice.

  “I’ve got to talk to you,” she said. “As soon as possible.”

  “I can’t get away till this evening. What is it Gwyn?”

  The worst, she said to herself. The worst. “Just something I have to tell you.”

  “Should I come to your place?”

  “Yes, but meet me on the beach out front.” She was already hoping the ocean and waves and sand would soften what she had to say, but in the hours of ruminations that followed all she could imagine herself telling Hark was the blunt message of murder.

  By the time she spotted him from her balcony and started down the elevator, she knew the truth, in her case, could never be varnished. It would always stand encumbered by the special kind of cruelty that set to right all that had gone wrong in a young woman’s life more than twenty years ago.

  She walked to him slowly, feeling the fading warmth of the sun on the sand. He took both of her hands, as if he knew the import of their meeting, and she realized the urgency she’d felt when she called him must be alive in her eyes.