by Rufi Thorpe
“Was she seeing anyone?” the detective asked me, and I gained control of my facial muscles just a fraction of a second too late. She’d seen me tense up. If I lied now, she would think everything I’d said was a lie. If I told her the truth, she would be more likely to assume the rest was the truth, or at least this was my logjammed logic in the moment. Plus, I wanted to roll on Eric like the wheels on the bus.
“She was seeing someone, but it was a secret. Coach Eric, her volleyball coach. He’s the assistant coach at the high school, but after she was suspended her father had hired him to keep her skill set up, and eventually things turned romantic between them. But as far as I know, this was only in the last couple weeks.”
I suppose I had wanted Detective Kirby to seem surprised, or at least interested, but she just nodded and said, “We’ll talk to him too.”
“Is he going to be in trouble?” I asked.
“She’s eighteen,” Detective Kirby said, and gave me a look like I was crazy. “Is there some reason he should be in trouble that you know about?”
“I guess not,” I said, fiddling with my ear.
“All right, well, let me get your phone number and we may ask you to come down to the station again later on.”
“I’d be happy to,” I said.
I called Ray again and got his voicemail. Where the fuck was he? The search had been going on for two hours now. I had watched them cart item after item from Bunny’s room, her laptop, bags of her clothes, her school notebooks. There were two officers deep into digging through Ray’s office, which perhaps explained why he was staying far away. One of the SWAT guys was smoking out by the pool. And I thought: Isn’t that unsanitary? Isn’t that disrupting the crime scene? I saw Detective Kirby go up to him. “Get the fuck out of here,” she said.
“Let me milk this,” he said, laughing. “I’m on overtime. Give me fifteen more minutes and I can buy my girlfriend a mani-pedi.”
“Manicures cost more than you think,” Kirby said, unsmiling. “Get gone.”
I was darkly interested. I could remember the police from when I was small, coming when the neighbors called the cops because of the fighting, and they never failed to fill my small body with adrenaline. So I was interested to have the chance to examine them now with more adult eyes. They seemed like all right types. The men were loud, performing their masculinity so hard they waddled around, hips stiff as arthritic cowboys. Or maybe they all had injuries from playing high school football. Who knew? But I didn’t hate them. Honestly, they reminded me of Jason.
When they finally left three hours later, there was black fingerprint dust everywhere and I was unclear whether I was even allowed to clean it up. I went outside and smoked a cigarette, then lay down on the couch and somehow fell asleep.
* * *
—
When I awoke, Ray and Swanson were in the kitchen, and from the light coming in through the curtains I guessed it was midafternoon. I was not sure why I had fallen so deeply and thickly asleep; perhaps it was some peculiar reaction to the adrenaline of the morning. When I stood my legs were stiff and I walked awkwardly. Swanson and Ray were sharing a bottle of white wine. I suddenly hated them so much that it seemed impossible to go on.
“I can’t have them look into that building,” Ray was saying. “They’ve got to drop that arson charge.”
“They haven’t charged her yet, we won’t know what they’re going to charge her with until arraignment,” Swanson said.
“Swanson. Swanson. What do we do? What can we do?”
“Have you paid her bail?” I asked by way of hello.
“Not yet,” Swanson informed me. “Look who’s up.”
“Why not?”
“We’re trying to make a game plan,” Ray said. “There’s Thai food on the way.”
“Are you not going to bail her out?” I asked. Ray avoided my gaze, took a sip of his wine.
“Bail is set at two million,” Swanson said.
“But can’t you get a bond, or like a—you don’t have to pay all that.”
“A bail bondsman would still need two hundred grand,” Swanson said.
Ray looked out the kitchen window in a frozen way, pretending to ignore our conversation. I realized he was embarrassed that he couldn’t pay.
“But I think the DA is going to charge the arson even if they don’t have the evidence, Ray,” Swanson started up again, touching his own face in a way that made me want to scream that he was going to give himself acne. “And arson is a serious charge.”
“If they look at that building close, they’re gonna find everything.”
“How bad is it?” Swanson asked. “I don’t want to know details, just give me an idea on a scale of one to ten.”
“Like, a seven? A six or a seven.”
I thought about what Bunny had told me about Ray stealing her identity, the credit card debt, the mortgage in her name, the bribed inspectors, the illegal fuse boxes. “I mean, I would say it’s a nine at least,” I said.
“Somewhere between a seven and a nine,” Ray said, and without breaking eye contact with Swanson he got out another glass and poured, shoved it in my direction.
“I mean, the police are going to investigate,” Swanson said. “There’s no question about that.”
“What if she copped to the murder charge?” Ray asked.
“What?”
“If she pled no contest on the second degree murder, do you think the DA would make the arson go away? I mean, if they charge her.”
Swanson shook his head. “It depends. I mean, without the arson, I would say they never intended to go to court on second degree murder, and they’re going to offer a plea bargain down to voluntary manslaughter. And they may still go down to voluntary manslaughter. But I’m not a criminal defense attorney, as I have told you many times. With the arson, it all depends how good their evidence is. I mean, if there’s video cam footage from the construction site or something, if they have her doing it, then they’re gonna have a lot of leverage. But it’s also true, she only set those panels on fire. There was no damage other than that, so we’re not talking about a conflagration here. And they were her property to begin with.”
“They found her clothes that smelled like gasoline,” I said.
“Not great,” Swanson said.
But Ray wasn’t having it. “There are no cameras down there, I never had cameras put in, there was no reason to. Ann Marie’s mother is up the DA’s ass about a murder charge, and he knows he can’t win if we go to court. You know he can’t win. No jury is going to convict a teenage girl of murder on what they have. My friend who’s a doctor, a fucking brain surgeon, told me it was a freak thing, that it was one in a million Ann Marie died from that bleed. I bet we could even cast doubt—you know, maybe it was medical malpractice. Maybe her case was mismanaged by the hospital.”
I did not believe this, but I tried to hold it in.
“It’s also true,” Swanson said, just rubbing and rubbing his greasy fingers over his cheek, “that juries don’t like arson. Lots of boring testimony from experts. They don’t understand it, and they don’t convict well. They’re not going to want this to go to trial, it’s too expensive for one thing. But it’s a lot, getting them to drop the arson and negotiating down to manslaughter. But second degree murder.”
“You can’t let her hang on the murder charge,” I said, finally exploding. “I mean, she’s your daughter!”
“No one’s letting her hang,” Ray said, angrier than I’d ever seen him. He took a step closer to me and his face was red-purple. He panted for a moment, glowering at me, then took a sip of his wine. “Better that she do six years for second degree murder than five years for voluntary manslaughter and five years for arson and meanwhile all our assets are seized and I wind up doing time so I can’t help her! I’m trying to be smart here!”
&nbs
p; “Maybe he should leave the room,” Swanson said. “This was not wise. This was not wise at all.”
“He’s goddamn family, Swan,” Ray said. “He’s practically Bunny’s brother. He’s just as worried about her as we are.”
While I was touched that Ray would count me as family, I certainly thought I was a great deal more concerned about Bunny than they were. I thought Ray wanted her to take the murder charge to save his own ass, but I also wasn’t sure Bunny would really be better off taking both charges to trial, and I wasn’t sure if Ray could pay Swan through two trials anyway, or if Swan could pull off a trial at all. He was a plaintiff lawyer for a firm that did mostly class action suits that settled out of court. Even talking about a trial here in the kitchen, he had grown moist with sweat.
“Ray, I have to tell you something,” Swanson said.
“What is it, Swan?”
“Second degree murder. It’s a minimum sentence of fifteen years. It’s not something we want to take to trial even if we think we can win.”
“All the more reason to plead,” Ray said. “What I’m telling you, Swanson, is that it won’t just be arson, it will be the beginning of a whole thing. And we can’t do it. Trial isn’t an option.”
“I’ll talk to the DA,” Swanson said.
And then the Thai food got there.
* * *
—
I guess I had thought that Swanson would make an appointment with the DA’s office, or that he would make a phone call, but he insisted that the best way to go about it was to drive to the Airport Courthouse and hang out in the hallway near a courtroom where the prosecutor handling the case was scheduled to be and then grab him on his way out. Ray and I were to stay out by the car in the parking lot and wait for him to come out and tell us what happened.
The Airport Courthouse was a building from the future, ten stories tall, with glass elevator shafts that made it look like criminals were ascending to the sky to be judged by the gods. I smoked a cigarette and leaned against Swanson’s BMW. Ray got out of the car.
“Can I have one?” he asked.
I handed him a cigarette and lit it for him.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many dinged cars in my life,” I said, surveying the parking lot. It was a sea of messed-up cheap cars interspersed with gleaming BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes. The accused and their attorneys. A minivan for the court reporter. A cluster of squad cars. And I thought that inside the building, the pageant of justice was being performed, as though the contestants had free will, as though anyone could blossom into a hero or a monster through sheer force of character. But out here in the parking lot, it was clear that if you were poor, your car simply had more dings in it. You were poor, you got a drug charge, you got a gun charge, ding, ding, scrape, scratch, because those were the problems that came from growing up in a poor neighborhood. They were not signs of individual moral turpitude.
These were problems that most kids in North Shore never even ran into. And I still believed that the fact that Ray and I were leaning against a BMW would be what saved Bunny. Not that she was innocent, not that she was worthy of love or dignity or mercy. Not that justice was blind or would be made manifest on earth as it is in heaven. I was counting on her rich daddy. I was counting on her milky-white, Aryan-wet-dream skin. I was counting on idiot Swanson and his correct sense of how to match a tie to a shirt. It was almost lavish, I reflected, the way Swanson was so obviously only quasi-competent. As a rich, white man, he could afford to let it show, the same way a skinny bitch with Kate Moss hips could wear unflattering avant-garde silhouettes. I trusted Swanson with Bunny’s case when I wouldn’t have let him run a girls’ softball team. He couldn’t have managed two toddlers at a mall. He was nothing but a floppy, spineless concatenation of wine trivia and pretentious sushi-ordering skills dressed up as a human man and walking around.
I didn’t like Ray or Swanson, and yet I found myself allied with them and it was causing me to hate them more intensely than I might have otherwise.
“I just want you to know,” Ray said, after taking a drag on his cigarette, “how much I appreciate you. It will not be forgotten. The way you’ve been there for Bunny.”
“Thanks, Ray,” I said, and prayed he would not continue talking. We were stuck here in this parking lot together, and I knew some amount of talking was unavoidable, but I hoped to keep it nugatory if possible.
“There’s one thing I’ve been wanting to bring up,” he began, and I felt my revulsion for him gathering in the base of my skull in a slow wave.
“That night,” he said, “that terrible night, where we had the misunderstanding about gay schoolteachers,” he said. “You mentioned about Allison driving into traffic.”
“I’m very sorry for saying that,” I began, thinking that what he wanted was an apology.
“No,” he said and waved me off. “I understand—I mean, listen, if people are saying that, I get it. I think a lot of people hated Allison.”
“Why?” I asked, aghast.
“Because she was beautiful and funny. She always dressed well. She had a kind of clique with the other mothers, and people could feel left out. If you weren’t in their group. I know Ann Marie’s mother often felt that way. And maybe there was a perception of Allison as being somehow cold. But she never meant to leave any of those women out, she just wasn’t thinking about how things seemed. She was shy. She hung out with only the same four women because she was shy. She was a very gentle person. Anyway, her tire blew out as she was going around a curve and she swerved into oncoming traffic on PCH.”
“Good god,” I said.
“But the thing is, it was a new car, a Ford Explorer. Why would a brand-new tire blow out like that? That’s how I met Swanson, actually. Well, we met in AA, but then during my share, I was agonizing about what I could have done, and maybe if I had taken it in for an oil change that week, they would have noticed something was up with the tire. I remember Swan interrupted, which is a big no-no, no cross talk, to ask what kind of car it was. I said it was a Ford Explorer and his eyes just popped out of his head because his firm was already handling the class action suit at the time. They were Firestone tires and Ford had lowered the psi on them to try and keep their SUVs from tipping—remember that? How they would roll in a sharp turn? They didn’t want to do a redesign, too expensive, so they put these low-pressure tires on it. So it was kismet, basically. I never would have known. I would have thought it was some freak thing, maybe she drove over metal spikes or who knows what, but without Swanson I never would have known.”
I believed him completely, even though I trusted Ray Lampert about as much as I would trust a talking doll on Halloween. It just made sense of too many things. I had known Swanson handled class action suits. He would always joke it was the only job where you could get paid millions to get your client fifty cents.
“And Bunny knows?”
“Oh god, yes,” he said.
“Well, I’m really sorry I said that, Ray,” I said. “I feel like a real turd.”
“You’re not a turd! You’re not. Someone told you that. Not your fault you believed them. Makes me sad people are saying that, though. Still saying that.”
“Did you at least get a big settlement?” I asked.
“Actually, yeah. I was a named plaintiff, and those get bigger payouts. For Swan it was a win because the story was just so perfect. Beautiful woman, a young mother, struck down in her prime. You know, no one was drunk, nothing to muddy the waters. And we work well together, and there’s a lot of—if you’re a named defendant, you’re deposed and you have to attend the trial and make decisions.”
“Wow,” I said. I wondered what had happened to all that money.
“So that was when we decided to do the remodel of the high school,” he said.
“You did that?”
“Well, yeah,” he said, “
how am I gonna get rich people to buy houses here if that school looked like shit? Smartest thing I ever did. Complete teardown. It was incredible, took years.”
It was so complicated, the good and evil in him. They were so densely intermixed.
“Did you have a good marriage? With Allison?” I asked.
“Oh, absolutely. I worshipped her. I was like a lapdog.”
I thought about Bunny telling me he would break one of Allison’s vases or some other beautiful thing she loved on purpose and then keep her up all night, accusing her of loving the object more than she loved him, trying to torture her into confessing what he suspected all along.
“She was my one true love,” he said, staring off into the distance.
We waited in that parking lot for a full forty minutes, and then Swanson appeared, and we could tell from his aggressive swagger that the news was good. We were practically jumping up and down by the time he got to the car. “What is it, what is it?”
“Huzzah!” Swanson proclaimed.
“Jesus fucking Christ, tell us what happened,” Ray said.
“Bye-bye arson, three years on voluntary manslaughter. They’re willing to support an OR at arraignment.”
“What’s an OR?” I asked.
“Released on her own recognizance,” Ray and Swanson said in unison as they swung open the doors of the BMW. I scrambled to get into the backseat as Swanson turned over the engine.
We were blind with pleasure at his triumph. It would be years before I wondered why the DA’s office seemed so eager to drop the arson and agree to voluntary manslaughter. They must have known they couldn’t take the arson or the second degree murder to trial and win. Would a seasoned criminal defense attorney have been able to talk them down to involuntary manslaughter? A suspended sentence and three years’ probation? What would Bunny’s life have been if Ray had hired her a real lawyer?
