The Pain Scale

by Tyler Dilts

  “I won’t. Have a good time.”

  Patrick called it a day soon after. As he left, he handed me a Post-it note that read, BAILEY0426.

  “What’s this?”

  “Sara’s password.”

  “Password? For what?”

  “Facebook, Gmail, and just about everything else, it looks like.”

  “Bailey’s birthday,” I said. I’d had to type it into forms several times already in the course of the investigation.

  “Yeah. Bad enough to use such a predictable password. But to use it for everything?” He looked at me and thought he saw something. “Danny, you don’t use the same password for everything, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  He didn’t look like he believed me.

  I knew we’d probably have to comb through Sara’s e-mail at some point, but I decided to look first at her Facebook page. I’d only been out on sick leave for a bit over a year, but in that time, dissecting a victim’s Facebook page had gone from being something you did when you started running out of things to do to one of the first steps in building a victimology.

  I opened up Sara Gardener-Benton’s account and started with the basics. Under her name it said, Went to Marina High School * Lives in Long Beach, California * Married to Bradley Benton III * Born on November 24. Bradley’s name wasn’t highlighted. No page for him. Did that mean the rumors about him running for office were true and he didn’t want any drunken exploits from his college days showing up online? Or just that he’d managed to avoid being bitten by the social media bug infecting just about everybody else? Her privacy settings were set to the highest levels, which I found, for some inexplicable reason, to be reassuring.

  On Sara’s profile page, I discovered she liked the music of Neko Case and Wilco, listed her political views as moderate, her favorite quotation as “You’re gonna need a bigger boat,” and when it came to TV, preferred Arrested Development. So aside from the questionable politics, she had good taste.

  I clicked on her Friends list. She had 172 of them. Aside from several family members whose names had come up so far in the investigation, only Catherine Catanio’s name rang any bells. We might need to dig deeper into the list at a later point, but for now, we could leave it.

  There were more than two hundred photos and two dozen videos. I didn’t look at all of them, but from my cursory examination, it appeared that they were more or less the same files as those stored on her computer and phone. Again, something we might need to investigate in more detail later.

  I spent a few more minutes examining Sara’s Wall. Fortunately, she wasn’t a prolific poster, and her status updates tended toward the straightforward: Sara Gardener-Benton is hoping her sweeties get well soon. Sara Gardener-Benton is wishing she picked up the Costco lasagna instead of making it from scratch. Going back a few days, I found one gem: Black Swan Best Actress? WTF?

  I kept poking around for a while, but without going deep and doing a comparison with the other case materials—a task that would take a very long time to complete—I wasn’t going to find out much more about Sara.

  Logging off, I thought about Jen. It was ten minutes after eight. I wondered if she’d think that I’d worked too late.

  I picked up a six-pack of Sam Adams at Ralphs, parked my car at home, and walked six blocks to Harlan Gibbs’s house. He was an LA County deputy sheriff who’d retired after thirty-five years on the job. We’d met the previous year during the case on which I’d nearly lost my hand. He’d lived across the street from the victim, a high-school English teacher with whom he’d formed a fatherly bond. Her loss was a hard one for him to bear, and I’d taken to visiting him every week or two for lunch or an evening drink.

  I rounded the corner and saw him sitting on his front porch, the fringe of thin white hair around his bald head backlit by the bare hundred-watt bulb next to the door. He raised a hand in greeting as I crossed the lawn.

  “Harlan,” I said, “good to see you.”

  “Saw you on the news today.”

  “Yeah?” I sat down in the empty white plastic chair next to him.

  “Yeah. You did a real nice job of standing there behind all the important people.” He didn’t smile, but there was a hint of playfulness in the gravel of his voice.

  “Least I’m on the job. Could just be spending all my time sitting on the porch and spying on the neighbors.”

  “You just go ahead and make fun. We haven’t had a crime on this street since...” His voice trailed off, and I knew we were both thinking about Elizabeth Anne Williams.

  We gave her a moment of silence.

  “Who’s renting the place now?”

  “Nice young couple. Just had a baby. They won’t be there long, though. They’ll need another bedroom.” The guesthouse Beth had lived in had only one.

  “I ran into her sister a few weeks ago.”

  “The lesbian?”

  “Yeah. She’s doing well. Their mother moved out here. Got a little house up by City College. They’re picking up the pieces.”

  We were quiet a while. Harlan opened two beers and passed one of the bottles to me. I wondered what he was thinking. Was he picking up the pieces? How much time did he spend sitting on the porch and staring at her house? But who was I to be critical? How many sleepless nights had I spent thinking about Beth? And I hadn’t even known her. Not while she was alive.

  “I wasn’t going to say anything,” he said, looking off into the distance. I tried to follow his gaze, but I was unable to tell where it fell, if anywhere at all. He didn’t finish the thought, and I didn’t push him to.

  So we sat. I didn’t check my watch, but it seemed like a long time.

  Finally, he spoke. “Went to the doctor last week.”

  Uh-oh.

  “Been having stomach problems.”

  “You mentioned that the last time I was here.”

  “Yeah. It’s been getting worse.”

  “What did the doctor say?”

  “Says I have a ‘mass.’”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Means I see the oncologist tomorrow.”

  Shit. “You want some company?”

  “Got some. Cynthia’s coming in from Ontario.”

  I’d never met his daughter, and he didn’t talk about her often. My impression had always been that he cared deeply about her but that their relationship was distant and maybe more strained than he would have liked.

  I didn’t know what to say. So I settled for “Fuck.”

  “Yeah.”

  Another long silence. A cricket started chirping somewhere on the side of his house. Pinpricks of pain climbed my arm.

  “You worked Homicide,” I said.

  “For a bit, yes.”

  “Then you know what I’m about to say isn’t bullshit. It’s just going to sound like it is.” Every death investigator I have ever known has uttered the phrase “I’m sorry for your loss,” or some variation of it, literally more times than they can count. It sounds trite and clichéd and insincere. The truth is that it is rarely any of these things. It is virtually always said with honesty and earnestness. We say nothing more because the sentiments we want to express can’t be given voice. Words simply can’t capture them in any meaningful or satisfactory way. So I hoped he understood when I said, “I’m sorry.”

  “I know, Dan.” The corners of his eyes wrinkled when he spoke. “You didn’t even need to preface it.”

  Nine

  AS SOON AS I left Harlan, the pain worsened. The sharp, needling sensation began in my palm and shot up my arm and into my shoulder and neck. I stretched as I walked, pulling my left hand this way and that, rolling my shoulder to the front and back, angling and twisting my head from side to side. Other than making me look odd, it didn’t accomplish much.

  At home, I stood in the kitchen and held the Vicodin bottle in my hand. I’d only had two beers at Harlan’s. (Two beers really isn’t that much, is it? No, two beers is nothing at all. Doesn’t even
count, really.) I thumbed open the bottle and shook two pills into my hand. They were white and oblong, and when I held one up to the light, I could read its name spelled out on one side. The other side had one of those little lines for cutting it in half. I couldn’t imagine many people wanting to do that.

  I put the pills back into the bottle, screwed on the childproof cap, dropped it next to the multivitamins I never take, pulled a shot glass out of the cupboard, and crossed the kitchen to the freezer.

  The Grey Goose went down like hot ice. It melted the tension in my stomach, and I felt warm waves radiating out from my center. I poured another and drank it down. Then I did it one more time. Not long after, I took one more glass into the darkened living room and sank into the couch.

  For a few moments, the sensation pulled my attention away from the burning ache, and soon, when I began to settle into the drunkenness, I found myself in sort of a middle place between the pain and the inebriation.

  The drapes were usually drawn on the picture window in the front of my duplex. That night, though, I’d left them open, and I nursed my glass of vodka and stared at the palm tree across the street in the neighbor’s yard. A frond was hanging low and swaying back and forth in the light breeze. I thought if I watched long enough, it might lull me to sleep.

  It didn’t.

  I keep a hydroculator—a kind of hot pack filled with a claylike substance that’s designed to give off moist heat—in a pot of water on my stove. It has to stay wet all the time. I put it in the microwave for four minutes, wrapped it in a kitchen towel, took it into the living room, and slung it over my shoulder, high on my neck, as I reclined on the sofa. If the scalding sensation didn’t exactly relieve the pain, at least it made it feel different.

  I knew sleep wouldn’t come easy, but a few hours later, I tried going to bed. Over the years that I’ve suffered from insomnia, I’ve taught myself to relax in bed, even when I can’t sleep. It doesn’t always work, but most nights, I manage to lie there, breathe deeply, calm myself, turn down the volume on most of the anxieties and neuroses that bounce around the inside my head, and actually get some small amount of rest. In all honesty, sometimes I feel better after these nights than after one of my fitful and dream-filled nights of sleep. Like so much else, it’s a crapshoot.

  I knew shortly after my head hit the pillow, though, that it wouldn’t be a peaceful night. After an hour of tossing and turning and thinking about things I didn’t want to think about, I got out of bed. I watched the last three-quarters of Craig Ferguson, about an hour of CNN, and then tried to find something interesting to read. Waiting on the coffee table was the previous week’s New Yorker, unread except for the cartoon, which I always read as soon as the magazine arrived, saving the articles for nights like these. Sometimes I even got desperate enough to read the short fiction.

  Seymour Hersh had a new piece that filled an hour or so; then I skimmed some of the other articles, then gave up on reading altogether and worked on an iTunes mix I’d been making for Jen. I hadn’t given her a new one since I’d been back at work, but I couldn’t decide whether Sparklehorse’s “Painbirds” should be the first track or the last. Sooner or later, I’d figure it out.

  When there were less than three hours left until I’d have to get up to start the day, I turned off the lights, turned on the radio to Morning Edition for a bit of background sound, and went back to bed. I was able to keep my eyes closed for most of the time.

  The next day, Jen had to testify in court on a gang killing that had occurred when I’d been out on sick leave. While I was working on my own, the plan was for me to coordinate the statements from the canvass that Marty, Dave, and the uniforms had conducted, go deeper into the victimology, arrange a few more interviews, and try to look for common threads in the various bits of evidence we’d acquired so far.

  Before I got to any of that, though, I decided to spend a bit of time online researching the congressman. When I thought about it, I realized I knew quite a bit less about him than it seemed like I had. Aside from recalling a minor financial scandal from a few years earlier, I couldn’t really think of anything specific about him.

  The first thing I discovered was how fucked up the gerrymandered congressional district lines are in Long Beach. I knew the city was divided turf, represented by two different people, but I’d never looked at just where the dividing line was. Benton’s district, the 46th, was shaped like a dumbbell in an old cartoon, with one of the larger ends encompassing the Palos Verdes Peninsula and the other Huntington Beach, Newport, and Fountain Valley areas. Through most of Long Beach, the dividing line was only two or three blocks from the ocean, separating those who could afford million- and multimillion-dollar homes from everyone else. The part of the city north of the district line shared representation with Carson and Compton, two towns on the opposite end of the socioeconomic spectrum. It made me think of the crime and gang activity maps that frequently circulated around the department. Guess which side of the line got the most ink on those.

  I tried not to let any of this prejudice my opinion of the congressman. As I visited the different pages on his website, I kept reminding myself that he wasn’t necessarily a bigger fuckhole than anyone else in Congress. He toed the party line on every major issue—health care, global warming, immigration. The only thing that really surprised me was that nothing surprised me.

  The bio was brief and uninformative. Southern California native. Grew up on the beach. College. Air force. Law school. Family. Blah, blah, blah.

  Truth be told, though, I didn’t expect the Twitter feed that told me @RepBenton had not only been to Home Depot recently but would “speak soon on House floor about Reagan on the centennial of his birth CSPAN” and that I should “take a moment to sign up for the House Natural Resources Committee’s weekly e-mail newsletter—new edition today!”

  But was any of this relevant to the case? I needed to find out more about the congressman’s son to figure that out. So far, I didn’t have anything solid on his background. The rumor was that he was being groomed to follow in his father’s footsteps, but there weren’t enough “Bradley Benton III” Google hits for me to make the same sort of half-assed assumptions I was making about his father.

  I knew Patrick would be doing online background for everyone of interest in the case. His history in Computer Crimes made him the squad’s go-to person for any kind of Internet research. Nobody I knew was better than he at finding every rock that could be looked under. After all, it had only taken him ten minutes to figure out Sara’s Facebook password.

  Not wanting to cover the same ground he would be going over, I called Patrick. He didn’t answer his cell, though, so I left a message.

  I stopped Googling and opened Marty’s notes on the canvass. There were only half a dozen with any substance at all, and aside from the van, none shared any common details.

  I decided to let that go for the time being and see if I could find out about Bradley. I wanted to find out just what the official story was on Bradley’s political aspirations was.

  “Roger Kroll’s office,” the young woman who answered the phone said.

  I identified myself and asked, “Is this Molly? Molly Fields?”

  “Yes, Detective, it is.” She sounded surprised. At her place in the pecking order, she probably wasn’t used to people remembering her name. “How can I help you?”

  I thought about asking for Kroll as I had intended, but I figured Molly would know the story as well as anyone and be more forthcoming with additional details.

  “I wanted to ask you about some things I’ve been hearing in some of the news reports.”

  “Okay.” There was an edge of uncertainty in her voice that I hoped might work to my advantage.

  “Well, I’ve heard a few reporters mention that Bradley is thinking about running for office himself. They’ve been mentioning the thirty-seventh district. Is he planning to run?”

  With a practiced confidence, she said, “The congressman and his son
are exploring options in that regard.”

  “That means yes, doesn’t it, Molly?”

  “Well...”

  “It’s okay, Molly. I’m not the media. Whatever you tell me is just between us. I promise you that.”

  “Yes, he was planning to run. Now, though, nobody seems to know what’s going to happen.”

  “That’s understandable. Things have changed. Bradley seems to be struggling very much with everything that’s happened.”

  Molly didn’t say anything in response to that.

  “Just one more question,” I said. “Would he get your vote?”

  There was just enough hesitation to confirm my suspicion. If I hadn’t been listening for it, I would have believed her when she said, “Of course.”

  Then, just for grins, I called Campos again.

  Fortunately, the trial that Jen was testifying on was in Long Beach, where the courthouse was just across the street from the police station, so we met for lunch in the squad room. Marty had been out most of the morning following up on the canvass, and on his way back, he brought us take-out sandwiches from Modica’s Deli. Pastrami for me, mozzarella veggie for Jen, and turkey for himself.

  As he unloaded the bag, Jen asked if there were any developments in the case.

  “Nothing so far,” I said. “I learned a bit about Congressman Benton, but probably nothing relevant. I am following him on Twitter, though.”

  “You thinking there’s some political angle?” Marty asked.

  “Not necessarily.” I unwrapped my sandwich. The grease from the meat had seeped through the paper along the edges. The hunger didn’t really hit me until the smell did, and the first bite tasted every bit as good as I had expected. “But we don’t want to rule anything out.”

  “A political conspiracy?” Marty said. “You do know that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone, right?”

  “Not according to James Ellroy and Oliver Stone,” I said.

  “I stand corrected,” Marty said. Then he tore into his sandwich.