Double Reverse

by Tim Green

  She hadn't seen Clark since her entrance. Maybe the note came from him. Maybe he wanted to beg her to come back to him, as he had done over and over on her answering machine. Maybe he was over the initial shock and his desire for her had mastered his hatred for what she'd done. Maybe he'd begin to paw at her and cry and tell her he forgave her--pathetic, but titillating. Maybe she'd fuck him right there in the grass and then walk away, telling him to grow up.

  Then again, maybe it was someone else entirely. Most women wouldn't consider acquiescing to this kind of mysterious note, but whoever sent it either knew her very well or was incredibly perceptive. To Angel, a note like this was irresistible. It spoke of secrecy and deceit, maybe even danger. She looked at her diamond Rolex. It was eleven-thirty.

  Angel had another vodka martini and entertained the ram- blings of Arnold Kassover, the man people were calling a lock for next year's best actor. At ten minutes to twelve she excused herself without an explanation. People were already moving outside onto the back terrace. A white sliver of moon had crept just above the treetops. Unlike the view from the city below, the air was clear and the stars blinked merrily.

  Angel descended a stone set of stairs and made her way past the last green. She stepped over some torn bunting, remnants of the day's golf tournament to benefit the children. Her heels clicked along the cart path, and the noise from the party soon became an indiscernible cascade, punctuated from time to time by the shrill laughter of one woman or another. Angel wondered how her own laughter sounded from a distance. She wasn't prone to laughing. Even so, she thought it was strange that she couldn't recollect what she sounded like when she did laugh.

  She stopped short suddenly. Amid the rustling of the wind high in the trees she thought she'd heard the whisper of her own name. She spun around in a complete circle.

  "Who is it?" she demanded.

  "Angel," came the voice, again in a gruff whisper. "Don't be afraid, Angel."

  She relaxed. Then an explosion ripped the night and she spun instinctively. Brilliant light filled her eyes. Fireworks. A distant cheer went up from the clubhouse. She turned back again to where she thought the whisper had come from and he was standing there, only a few feet from her. She took a sharp breath and a noise like a whistle escaped her throat.

  She raised her hands above her head to break the impact of the blow. Cold metal smashed down, snapping her forearm like a chicken bone, but her quick reaction had given her a chance to turn and flee. The next blow, however, hit her squarely in the back of the head, and it seemed to Angel that she tumbled forward in slow motion.

  The night sky above the trees was a celebration of light. She lay on her back in a daze. He was grinning over her now, and she realized from the anxious smile on his face just how close she'd come to getting away. Standing over her, he took a half swing with the club, and she felt a sharp pain in her wrist. A tear rolled down the side of her face and her jaw worked itself slowly open and closed as if she were trying to speak. Then he raised the club over his head with both hands, bringing it down in the center of her forehead, splitting her skull with a terrific crack.

  Chapter 25

  Lieutenant Augustus Brinson drove his unmarked Caprice Classic through the parking lot without slowing and right out onto the cart path. He felt the big car slide but punched it and fishtailed back around onto high ground. He hoped the arcing brown tracks would offend some rich prick when they opened the hole again. That there was some dead woman just off the eighteenth tee didn't surprise Brinson in the slightest. It surprised him that it didn't happen more often. People always said poverty was the breeding ground for crime, but Brinson figured it was the other way around. Rich people had more time to fuck things up. They probably committed more crimes per capita than poor people. The difference was that few of them ever got caught, and those who did more often than not slid out of it on the slimy trail of some lawyer.

  The Caprice lurched to a halt and Brinson got out onto the wet grass. His shoes were old and worn, so he didn't care when he busted up a little dried-up log of goose shit. At fifty-seven he was old for the force; the thin layer of graying hair plastered to the sides of his head proved it. His face was as big as a shovel and his chin rolled several times before melding directly into his torso, circumventing the need for anything by way of a neck.

  The sun was out, but its light was fractured by the high trees overhead. The detective filled his lungs with a rush of pine scent that reminded him of bathroom spray. Without embarrassment he hitched his pants so the belt ran smack across the middle of his waist. Lots of fat guys Brinson knew either cranked their pants up high toward their armpits or wore them hidden below the bulk of their gut, kidding themselves that they were only a fifty-four instead of the full sixty-two like Brinson. He made no apologies for his bulk. He liked to eat and he liked to drink. Whole milk was a good thing.

  "Mullet," he said, speaking to the assistant medical examiner the way card buddies will. Brinson looked off into the patch of blue sky and the white wisps of cloud that showed through the dark canyon of trees.

  The ME was as small and dainty as the detective was big and sloppy. He didn't bother looking up from the notes he was jotting down in a ratty yellow spiral notebook.

  "Brinson," he said.

  "Whataya got?"

  "Dead girl."

  "Something new."

  "Got a time of death for you," Mullet said, still writing.

  "I got a dog in the seventh for you," Brinson said. He took a white pistachio from the right pocket of his gray blazer, shucked it, gobbled the meat, and popped the shell into a common grave in his left pocket. He did this with the precision of a habitual nibbler.

  "I'm not kidding," Mullet said, offended.

  "Every time I ask for time of death you guys make me wait three days then tell me you don't know. This blood ain't dry and you're telling me you got time of death?"

  "He broke her watch. She raises her hands to protect her head," he said, raising his own hand and ducking as he presumed she had, "and the watch gets smashed. Twelve o'clock, just as the date's changing."

  "He?"

  "Women kill with knives, ice picks, and poison. You know that."

  "What'd he get her with?" Brinson asked, peering past the ME to where the body lay. "A golf club?"

  "Probably."

  "I was kidding."

  "I wasn't. Golf club has its own signature. I've only seen two of them before. Most people want to kill someone like this they do it with a baseball bat or a pipe or an ax handle. Then you don't know which is which. Just a blunt instrument. Golf club makes a big puncture wound. Check out her skull. Probably a big guy, too. Takes a lotta power to bust a hole in someone's skull. Besides, we're on a golf course . . ."

  "Any witnesses hear someone yell 'fore'?"

  Mullet shook his head sadly. Death was his business, but he didn't like to kid about it.

  Brinson popped another pistachio and walked over to where the body lay. He lifted the sheet and peered at the dark cave of blood in the pretty girl's forehead. There was another in the back of her head. He picked up her clammy arm and looked at the watch. Her other arm flopped outward just below the elbow at an angle that made Brinson think of a chicken wing.

  He straightened up and talked with the blue boys who had been first on the scene. They gave him the scoop on the Mexican groundskeeper who'd found her. They already had a guest list from the gala the night before. Brinson thanked them for getting the ball rolling and handed the grunt work over to Arnsbarger and Kelly, two of his sergeants, who had just pulled up in a maroon Concord. It was 6:30 a. M.

  By eight they knew the girl. Annie Garron Cassidy was a rich L. A. society girl who'd acted in some movies as a kid but never made the big time. Daddy, the producer, was dead. He had left her enough money so she didn't have to do diddly. Mommy, the French nanny from marriage number one, was back in France. The boyfriend was Trane Jones, a bad customer with a history of violence. Jones had enough power in his s
wing to reach the green of a par five in two, or cave in a pretty girl's skull in one. Brinson had him in a hot white room by nine. The star player smelled like cigarette smoke and expensive scotch. He looked like road- kill in sunglasses. Even his fancy leather pants were rumpled and creased.

  "Hard night?" Brinson asked, popping a nut into his mouth.

  Trane looked at him wearily, thought about telling him to fuck himself, thought better of it, and simply nodded yes. He wanted to get in and out. He wanted a shower. He wanted some sleep. This was his only day off.

  "You know your girlfriend is dead?"

  "That sucks," Trane said with an uncaring shrug.

  "When did you see her last?" Brinson asked.

  Trane didn't hide the fact that his last glimpse of her was through a faceful of vodka. He didn't pretend not to have made a move to cuff her for dousing him, or threatening to "kick her ass."

  "That's a love spat,"Trane said. "That ain't nothin'."

  He then told Brinson where he had been from that time on, right up until the detectives got out of their car in his driveway as he pulled up from a night so long it spilled into the day.

  "You didn't wonder what happened to her?"

  "Naw. Shit, we do battle, she gets her ass on home or wherever. That happened before. That ain't nothin. Hot-blooded, that's her," he said, smirking in a way that discounted the fact that she was wearing a toe tag. "In mo' ways 'n one."

  Brinson's face flushed with hatred. But instead of reacting he stuffed his emotions into some back corner of his mind and focused in on midnight. He asked Trane about his golf clubs, where they were.

  "Fuck is that to you?" Trane said, annoyed.

  "She was killed with a golf club. I'd like to see yours."

  Through the haze of weariness and the lingering grip of alcohol Trane suddenly became alert. "I didn't do a motherfuckin' thing," he said angrily. "You arrestin' me? Am I under arrest?"

  "No," Brinson said calmly. "No, we just wanted to talk to you."

  "Go talk to yo' fuckin' momma," Trane said, rising from the chair and starting for the door. Brinson did nothing to stop him. When he was gone, Brinson looked at the glass in the wall and said, "Follow him."

  Brinson sat for a second, then jumped up out of his chair and waddled out into the hall. "Don't lose his ass," he shouted to the detectives who were racing down toward the stairs. "Use a goddamn helicopter if you have to, but don't lose his ass!"

  Trane took a quick peek into his car's trunk, then ripped out of the municipal lot with tires shrieking. By the time he hit the 110 going south, a maroon Concord had fallen in comfortably behind him. Trane didn't bother to check his rearview mirror. He figured a fat slob like Brinson was still trying to get his ass out of his seat. He drove south all the way to the Pacific Avenue exit before heading for the harbor. After winding his way through the streets he shot between two warehouses and pulled right out onto the docks where the big ships were berthed. At the ass end of a big tanker named Metzaluna Trane stopped and hopped out. As Brinson's sergeants pulled out onto the pier they saw him heaving a three-iron with both hands out into the murky water beyond the ship's rudder. They had him in cuffs before Brinson arrived. At 5:37 the divers brought up the club with enough blood stuck on the head to bring Trane Jones in front of the magistrate on a charge of murder.

  Chapter 26

  Sitting wedged between her husband, Cody, and her son, Jo- Jo, in a ratty T-shirt and a faded pair of jeans, Madison looked ten years younger than she reailly was. Her chestnut brown hair was pulled back by a simple band, making her neck and nose appear to be longer than they really were. She was annoyed with herself for breaking her own rule and watching football on a weeknight. Sitting through every Friday night high school game that Cody coached, as well as Jo-Jo's Saturday-morning Little League games, before forfeiting every Sunday afternoon to the NFL was more than enough. She'd told them both long ago that on Monday or Thursday night they were on their own. But the truth was, she wasn't watching for the football. She was like every other red-blooded American lawyer. She was watching for a commercial.

  As stodgy as Caldbum, Baxter and Thrush might be, at the moment it was like every other workplace across the country, abuzz with the discussion of whether or not this particular commercial should be pulled from the air. In the spirit of true capitalism, Zeus Shoes, the company in question, had announced at a noon press conference that, despite the circumstances, it would continue to run its ads on Thursday night's prime-time football game as well as during other upcoming sports programming.

  During a noon press conference on CNN, Kurt Lunden, the sandy-haired walrus who was the CEO of Zeus, said, "Zeus Shoes will not bow to the pressures of political correctness. This ad was created in the spirit of competition, not crime, and Zeus Shoes refuses to presume anything but the innocence of Trane Jones, unless he is proven guilty in a court of law. If that were to be the case--and we have no reason to believe it will be--then Zeus Shoes would reassess its ad campaign at that time."

  Madison recalled the murmurs that had erupted from the crowd in the long conference room, her more liberal associates nodding with defiant chins while the conservatives wagged their heads like disappointed old dogs. She was one of the former. Of course she had a hard time believing that a rotten apple like Trane Jones, leaving a trail of smoke, hadn't created a fire. And of course she wasn't happy about the kind of mixed message Jones--and Zeus Shoes--might be sending to kids. But her entire legal career was based on the presumption of innocence. Despite the fact that Trane Jones had been arrested, despite his girlfriend having been killed--supposedly with a golf club that belonged to him--despite Trane's horrible past and everyone else's rush to judgment, it was Madison's place to presume innocence.

  "This is it, Mom!" Jo-Jo exclaimed. He'd seen the commercial during previous NFL games, and had already put in his request for a pair of the infamous shoes.

  Madison shifted her attention to the TV

  As the sun sank over a distant band of mountains amid a brooding apocalyptic sky, a lone motorcyclist raced down a single-lane highway toward the ground-level camera.

  "When you run alone . . ." came the deep rich voice of the announcer, "you count on your treads. . ."

  The camera cut to the spinning front wheel of a chopper with a big green, white, and black sneaker planted firmly on the peg just above it. Then it pulled out wide to reveal Trane Jones with a demonic grin kicking back spread-legged on his hog. The cape around his neck was a tattered American flag. His bare chest was a glossy sculpture marred only by a twisting mass of tattoos. His legs were snugly encased in red leather. The used-up stub of a fat cigar was clamped firmly in the corner of his mouth.

  "And when you're headed for the top ..." the rumbling voice continued, "you can't worry about the little things that get in your way."

  The picture quick-cut to a pink stuffed bunny resting peacefully in the middle of the road. Jones's bike roared through the frame, which then cut to a low angle of the mangled, smoking bunny with the bike racing away toward a flat-topped pyramid bathed in golden light.

  "That's killer," Jones muttered in a close-up shot of his face with the burning sky in the background.

  The camera went wide again to capture the bike shooting up the side of the pyramid. Jones skidded to a stop at the top and dismounted. In the middle of the pyramid's top was a pit writhing with snakes. The ad cut to a shot looking up through the snakes from the bottom of the pit. Jones stepped to the edge of the pit, sneakers first.

  "You fear no evil. . ." the voice intoned, "because you're as bad as anything on earth."

  Jones pitched his cigar butt to the side and leaped into the pit, landing feet first. The writhing snakes morphed into scantily clad women, their bodies bathed in oil, each one groping for the football star. With the voluptuous young models draped all over his body, Jones flashed his trademark smile from behind his blue shades and urged, "Zeus Shoes. . . they're killer."

  The final shot started in c
lose. It was the satisfied, sleeping face of a beautiful brunette with her cheek resting peacefully on another girl's naked flank. As the camera pulled up, Madison could see that the bottom of the pit was now littered with the bodies of blissfully sleeping women. The camera lifted to a bird's-eye view of Trane pulling away from the edge of the pit on his demonic chopper.

  "Zeus Shoes. . ." the announcer boomed as the screen faded to black, "they're killer."

  "Cooool," Jo-Jo said, drawing out the word to properly express the magnitude of the impression.

  Madison sat with her mouth open while on the TV Mike Patrick waxed on about the beautiful blimp shot of Soldier Field in Chicago where the game was taking place.

  "What'd you think of that?" Cody asked, tugging on her far shoulder where he'd draped his arm.

  "Unbelievable," she said. "No wonder everyone's in an uproar. If this guy really killed that girl... I mean, I know they're saying those women are sleeping, but they could be--"

  "Dead," Cody said with a solemn nod before turning his attention back to the game "I'm going to have to get me a pair of those shoes," he muttered.

  Madison looked at him, her mouth still agape.

  He looked back at her after a moment and grinned. "Kidding."

  "That's not even funny," she told him, half-serious. "Did you see Jo-Jo?"

  They both looked at Jo-Jo. He wasn't paying attention to them. The Bears were about to score.

  "I imagine Zeus is going to sell some shoes," Cody pondered.

  "It's unbelievable," Madison said, shaking her head. "Nobody cares anymore . . ."

  The Bears scored a touchdown and kicked their extra point. The ensuing commercial brought Jo-Jo back into their midst.

  "What do you think of Trane Jones?" Madison asked him, wondering about the practical effect of someone like that on a ten-year-old boy.

  "He's killer, Mom," Jo-Jo replied candidly. "You heard the commercial."

  Madison rolled her eyes. "Just because someone is in a TV commercial doesn't mean they're kill--" Madison checked herself. "Stop using that word, Jo-Jo!"