He Said, She Said

by John Decure

  Our son, who is over eighteen now and a legal adult, is a bit of a mess himself and even he got some counseling from Dr. Don. But he wasn’t directly involved in this fiasco, so forgive my bluntness, but he’s none of your damn business.

  Back to Rue. She cheats on our marriage, blows up the family, but today she swears she was a victim and says I’m the one who let it happen by ignoring her when she was in the pits for so long? Man, oh man, that’s a lot to digest.

  Okay. Thinking back, maybe I did. But then, she lied. I’m her husband, and she betrayed my trust.

  Hey, Andy? Stop the rambling. You sound like a knucklehead.

  It’s all too sad and confusing to think about for very long.

  Now, back to the Harley showroom today, this woman who comes into the shop between two and three, timing the afternoon lull perfectly. Asking for me. Insisting to see me.

  I can tell you, I may own this place but I’m more of a behind-the-scenes kind of guy, and I don’t cut the most dashing figure with the ladies, so customers pretty much never ask for me. But here she is, this tall but seriously curvy gal with all this wavy black hair, man-eater shades, a tank top and torn jeans practically painted onto her, and she’s “looking for Andy?” Oh, man oh man oh man!

  The first five minutes I spent showing her around this temple of rubber, metal, and chrome, giving her a nickel tour she seemed to be lapping up, I was thinking: what are the odds here, Andy, of you doing the horizontal mambo with this lovely lass? You know, realizing how long it had been since I last got some and how that dry spell had to end sometime.

  Never even thought about what she was doing here in the first place. Guess I’m not much of a salesman.

  She stopped in front of one of my favorites, a ’67 Triumph T120 Bonneville with chrome fenders, front and back, and a violet lacquer metal flake tank that was museum-worthy.

  “We call this one ‘Smoke on the Water,’” I explained.

  She walked around it.

  “Right—Deep Purple. That’s cute. I’d like a test drive.”

  I pictured myself out where the rubber meets the road, flicking my wrist and torqueing up this baby as the lovely lady wrapped herself tighter than ever around my waist.

  “Sure. Let me get my helmet. You need one too?”

  She looked at me as if I were stupid.

  “I brought one. But the test ride’s for me alone.”

  “I dunno, that’s a lot of bike, miss.”

  “Six hundred and fifty ccs. I know.”

  “Well, the lady knows her cycles. You sure it’s not too heavy?”

  She glanced over at the row of Harley 1200s that lined the front window.

  “It’s nothing like those beasts. I’ve got good balance. I can keep it between my legs. I’m a lot stronger than I look.”

  Wow—I loved the way she said that. She hadn’t even asked about the price tag, which would’ve given her about seventeen thousand reasons to look at something, oh, about thirty-five years newer. She took out her driver’s license. I studied it.

  “Bradlee Aames.” Odd name for a chick. M-1 DMV status, though. That was all I needed to know. “You’re good to go. Now, to take her out, you’ll have to leave a credit card here and—”

  “I don’t have time for that,” she said, shaking that luxurious head of hair, which had the effect of exposing a pair of golden brown shoulders.

  “It’s sort of our store policy to—”

  “You can come with me. Don’t worry, I won’t break any laws.”

  Man oh man oh man, I was blushing like a nervous kid.

  “Well hey,” I said, “the customer’s always right.”

  No idea—I had no idea where this was going, but at the very least it might result in the sale of one of our most expensive bikes, and I wouldn’t have to shell out any commission to one of my reps. What the hell—I went behind the reception desk and grabbed the keys to the Bonnie for the lady, and the ones to the ’62 Harley with the Panhead on a hardtail frame, a chopper just like the one Peter Fonda rode in Easy Rider. That’s a bike I’ve intentionally priced too high, to make sure it’s around for me to take a spin on it every now and again. Just sitting on a badass rig like that will shave ten years off your life, I swear. Riding it, you can subtract another ten. That bike is freedom incarnate, like dreaming when you’re wide awake, a middle finger salute to all the statutes and laws and rules and regulations, noise ordinances and moving violations and exhibition of speed prohibitions in the whole entire world. Makes me feel like Captain America.

  Yeah, well this middle-aged road rebel might’ve known he was in trouble when the lady tooled straight downtown and did a loop on Shoreline Village, which is roughly the same course they use for the Long Beach Grand Prix. The Harley I was motoring naturally sits up in the wind when you ride it, so I was fighting to keep up with her, but when she looped back onto the 710 freeway north, it was a whole different ballgame. She took that Triumph up to about ninety like it was nothing, leaving me well behind and flapping in the breeze like a sheet on a clothesline in a damn hurricane. Not so fast, I was thinking. When I saw her taillights blink up ahead, I knew she was playing a game of catch-me-if-you-can.

  I scrunched down, my head even with the handle grips, and got serious, blazing up past a red Nissan Z-car like it wasn’t even there and earning a sustained blast from the Z’s horn in salute to my audacity. When the lady hit the 405 southbound transition, I was starting to lose my cool. In all my years, I’d never seen a test ride go this far north, this fast. She more or less cruised the next few miles, with me barely managing to stay on her flank. Still haulin’ ass, but staying way right so she could take the hilly on-and-off ramps along Orange and Cherry avenues like they were part of a wonderfully engineered obstacle course built just for her motoring pleasure. Gotta say, although we were way off the usual test-driving map, it felt downright fabulous traversing those ramps, like riding a giant freewheeling roller coaster. When she exited on Spring Street and headed left, I had an idea what she had in mind. She wanted the stereophonic sound experience next, ’cause there’s nothing like the scream of a high performance cycle bouncing off a concrete wall or two or three.

  The best two tunnels in the city lay straight ahead: the first, a nice little shorty on Spring, tucked under the southwest corner of the Long Beach airport; and then, just down the road, a stretch of Lakewood Boulevard shaped like a half-mile piece of unbending pipe.

  She hit the Spring Street tunnel at speed, but not pushing it too hard, and we enjoyed the double roar of the bikes and sparkling strings of overhead lights more or less together. By the time that Bonneville hit Lakewood, though, she’d found another gear, and Smoke on the Water plain smoked old Captain America like an after-dinner cigar.

  I limped back toward the shop a good quarter-mile behind her, not even caring that I’d lost track of my own would-be customer on a rare, very expensive bike with a tank full of gas I’d paid for. Then I hit the traffic circle at Lakewood and PCH and she flew up in the lane next to mine. The smile and one-handed thumbs-up she flashed was a peace offering, I guessed, and I nodded as if hell, this was all part of my usual afternoon routine. But the fact is, I still had my jockey shorts around my neck and my balls in my throat from that bit of tunnel fun, and my eyes stayed glued to the highway.

  Ophelia was the first to observe my blanched face.

  “Welcome back, Captain America.”

  I shot Ophelia a look that said don’t push my buttons.

  “Hardy har.”

  Still grinning, she wisely retreated to her sales desk and picked up the phone.

  The lady named Bradlee took off her helmet, shaking that full head of hair.

  “Penny for your thoughts,” I said as casually as I could.

  “Thank you,” she said. “That was a total gas.”

  “We did have fun, didn’t we, though?”

  She nodded, but pensively, as if her mind was no longer on the open road.

  “Sorry, but
I’m not going to buy a motorcycle today. I might be back for one soon, though. Seriously.” She’d shut her eyes. “I’m picturing it, just not completely yet.”

  Huh. That was odd.

  I was about to say something flat-footed about our Try-It-You’ll-Like-It demo program, but then… I noticed how her legs were crossed, how she’d also wrapped her arms up around herself, tight. Made me recall how Rue, after the whole Dr. Don disaster, would twist herself up like a pretzel, hide out in a closet like that, when the grief loaded up too heavy in her head. Straitjacketed as if for self-protection.

  Now that was a weird flashback I didn’t at all get. What the hell? This wasn’t adding up. Not knowing what to make of her, I asked her point blank what she wanted.

  She’d told me she wanted to talk to me. To talk about Rue and Dr. Don. She wanted me to testify in court, to help get Dr. Don’s license revoked, put him out of business.

  My confusion was compounded.

  “Say what?”

  She handed me a card: Bradlee Aames, Deputy Attorney General, Department of Justice, Office of the Attorney General. That card read like ice water straight down my back.

  Numbly, I said: “You can’t be serious, miss. You must be joking.”

  “This is no joke.”

  She was a prosecutor for the state, all right, and she was sorry about the foreplay—yeah, that’s what she called it. But I hadn’t returned her phone calls. Which was true, a fact that didn’t help stoke my righteous indignation at the moment.

  “The civil case settled already, miss,” I pointed out. “Sorry, but there’s a gag order not to talk about the case. I couldn’t talk to you if I wanted. Same goes for Rue.”

  “That’s garbage,” she said.

  “But the lawyers, they—”

  “It’s an illegal side deal.”

  “That’s not what they said.”

  “Civil litigators cook up all kinds of oddball contingencies that don’t mean anything.”

  “It was an important contingency. We had to agree in order to, you know, get the money.”

  This Bradlee Aames seemed to find me amusing, and I watched her black eyes dance around the showroom.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “What if those lawyers told you that this month you didn’t have to charge sales tax? Would you do it?”

  “Okay, I see your point. But still—”

  She went into her black purse and came out with a subpoena, which she handed to me.

  “I could say no, you know.”

  “But you won’t. I can tell you’re a good citizen.”

  “I don’t have to cooperate with you, Miss… Aames.”

  Her eyes disappeared behind her dark shades. If she was twisted up and straining against something a minute ago, her womanly poise was by now back in spades.

  “See you in court.”

  “I mean it. I put this behind me. Behind me it’s gonna stay.”

  “You’ve been served.”

  My arm held out the piece of paper and dropped it at her feet.

  “Not anymore.”

  It felt good to take a stand, and I heard a murmur from Ophelia and Bitsy, my second-best sales gal, a petite, Latina babe-next-door who grew up around bikes and can blow minds reciting Harley nomenclature from memory. My chest got a little fuller knowing my staff was taking this in, seeing their boss stand up to the state of California, not taking it.

  The attorney named Bradlee Aames flipped her shades off her face and stepped right into my grill. Up close, her beauty had an instant effect on me, the way a double shot of Bacardi 151 will just erase your every thought and intention until all you can see, all that exists, is the bottle and the glass in front of you.

  “Let me tell you what you think you’re leaving behind,” she said. “Donald Fallon used his status as a medical doctor and psychiatrist to exploit your wife. He’s a sadomasochist masquerading as a trusted professional. Excuse my bluntness, but he fucked her and forgot her. Blew up your family.”

  “Jesus, you’re a brassy one, talking to me this way. Now you listen to me—what’s done is done. It’s no good talking about it now. And Rue is my ex, so don’t call her my wife.”

  “You think this is done, in the past?” she said. “Well, what really got done? He committed a criminal sexual assault, but your wife—”

  “I told you not to call her that!”

  “I say that because the victim, Rue Loberg, was your wife at the time. She was so torn apart from what the great Doctor Don did to her, the DA couldn’t possibly stick her in front of twelve jurors. So Fallon walked away from a crime. A violent felony.”

  “Guess that’s on the DA’s office. They could’ve took a shot, but they didn’t.”

  “Right,” she said with disgust. “So you put your crack civil litigation team together and wheedled a money settlement out of him, but so what? He didn’t make a single admission of wrongdoing and—”

  “Hey, don’t look at me! That was another one of those contingencies the lawyers insisted on.”

  “Yeah, sure, blame the lawyers. It didn’t involve you.”

  Man, she was glaring daggers into my eyes. So were my salesgirls.

  “What it means, Mister Loberg, is that patients still have no clue what he’s capable of doing. No warning. They’re vulnerable.”

  “Listen, Miss Aames, I admire your passion, and by the way, you are one hell of a rider. But this case of yours is not my problem.”

  “Wanna know what Doctor Don’s saying now? That your—wait, let me get the verbiage straight for you—that your ex-wife is a liar, not a victim. To hear him tell it, he’s the victim.”

  The whole thing, I mean how I was reacting, was just a mystery to me. It was like my face was hot and my eyes were tearing up, like a girl. And to think, this… humiliation was going down in my showroom, in front of my own staff, my people.

  “Well, that surely isn’t right,” I said. “Not my problem, though. Nope.”

  This lawyer, she was no dummy, and I could almost see the shift in her consciousness. Instead of staring right through me, those intense black eyes softened, the seek-and-destroy look gone out of them. She bent down to pick up the subpoena and her voice dropped with her, almost an octave as she slowed her breathing, reasoning with me now.

  “Without your testimony, Donald Fallon is going to move on to the next victim, and the next. You of all people know he will.”

  “Wouldn’t doubt it.”

  “I need you,” she said, very much like she meant it.

  “Please, Miss—”

  “And Rue needs you, to bolster her position. To stand by her as only you can.”

  She’d located my bottom line, and nothing that I thought I’d successfully pushed out of my life and left behind stayed there. The guilt, the pain, the anger and embarrassment, the whole bag of rocks—it all came crashing back onto my head, and I could barely breathe.

  “Don’t say that about Rue,” I sputtered. “I’ll come in and be a witness, but please, don’t say she needs me.”

  “All right,” she said, not quite understanding. “I won’t.”

  How to explain my show of emotion? I wondered. Who knew?

  The cycles stood in perfect rows like soldiers awaiting orders. Behind them, through the big glass windows, traffic on PCH clashed against a bland blue sky. An overhang of gray marine layer was closing in, casting patchy shadows on the tire store across the way. Pillars of colored balloons whipped against the breeze, as did a big white banner announcing a huge sale—50 to 80% off—at the tire place across the street. Those Iranian dudes who own it are always trying something new to attract business, but today it was to no avail. The place was empty.

  “See,” I said. “I know something about what that woman’s been through in her lifetime. And the thing is, I’ve got nothing, nothing at all on Rue.”

  The lady lawyer said she understood. And by God, I wanted to believe her.

  13

  DESHAUN FELLOWS, CERTIFIE
D PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR, FELLOWS AND ASSOCIATES, PRIVATE INVESTIGATIONS

  My back’s been hurting since probably around midnight, 1:00 a.m. Must’ve thrown it out helping Sadie move her furniture outta her little apartment. Yeah—jus’ another rescue mission in the dead of night. Sadie, she’s my stepdaughter from my second marriage to Ida Mae Wade, Ida Mae being the one seeking my impromptu furniture-moving services. Being that Ida Mae’s my personal secretary, bookkeeper, and wife going on ten years now, and she’s also the one writing my investigation reports, when Ida Mae asks me Can ya help, Deshaun, honey? The asking part’s jus’ a formality.

  Truth is, I never should’ve tried to get that sofa down those second-story stairs myself, but we were in a big hurry to get outta there before Sadie’s no-good bum of a fiancé, Lester Buggs, a.k.a. Bulldog—’cause of his mashed-up face and mashed-up demeanor—came home from his nightly drinking and carousing and assorted no-good whatnot he’s always getting into. Bulldog, he’s a mean one for sure. I checked him out back when he first started comin’ around calling on Sadie, and let me tell you, the war vets, parolees, and street hustlers I check in with around Central and 125th, to a man they all says he a smooth operator, always working somethin,’ but he get mad, he get personal, boy’s temper turn him into some kind of Jeckyll-and-Hyde stone cold killer, shoot first, ask questions later, sleep like a baby that night. To a man, that was the word on Bulldog.

  Anyhow, I set one side of the sofa up on the metal railing, run over to the other side, get the sofa sliding on down, nice n’ easy does it, sliding along okey-dokey ’bout halfway down, with me underneath the damn thing scrambling like a cockroach, one eye peeled jus’ in case Bulldog might’ve run through his drinking money early and popped on home. Jus’ get me outta here, Lord, I’m praying, n’ right about then that damn sofa starts tilting like its about to flip right over onto the patio down below. Should’ve jus’ let it go, let her rip, ’cause that saggy-ass sofa?—It’s about as valuable as ole Lester, you know? Not worth the trouble n’ no damn good anyhow. Damn near let it go, too, let it crash on down n’ bust into a hundred pieces, but it weren’t my sofa, n’ I recall thinking: It ain’t right for me to decide to junk the thing. Not my call, even if it’s the right one.