by Susan Kandel
Tommy’s room was at the end of the line. I knocked on the door. Annie opened it.
“Hi, Mom,” she said, looking down at her bare feet. Her toenails were each polished a different color.
“Hi, baby,” I answered, wrapping her up in a hug. I could feel my shoulder getting wet, but I didn’t think I should be the one to talk first. I waited for a long time, quietly staring at the skateboard decals on the window.
“I like your shoes, Mom.”
“Thanks, honey.”
“They’re really pretty.”
“I like your toenails.”
“The Hello Kitty pastel palette. Nina did it.”
“What’s going on?”
“I know what I’m doing even if you don’t think so. I made a mistake and I have to fix it.” Annie started to pace, something she always did when she was nervous.
“What mistake? Honey, please. Sit down and we can talk this through.”
“You always want to talk it through. Why didn’t you and Dad talk it through before you screwed everything up?”
“Where did that come from? We’re not talking about me and your dad.”
“Exactly how many men have you slept with?”
She was as matter-of-fact as an H&R guy tabulating tax deductions.
Stalling for time, I dropped my purse and went to retrieve it. I considered crawling out of the room while I was down there, but that would have been counterproductive. Time to face the music. Honesty is the best policy. I made my bed, now I had to lie in it.
“Nine.”
“Nine! How is that possible?” Annie demanded. “You weren’t with anyone before Dad, and after him, there was only Joshua, right?”
“Well, not exactly,” I said slowly. “There was somebody before your dad, and there were a few before and after Joshua, but no one significant. Well, not really significant, except maybe for Peter Gambino, but that sort of fizzled. Oh, and Alex. But he moved back to Milwaukee before we had a chance to find out if there was anything there.”
Alex, I reminisced. Thick, curly hair. Muscles in all the right places. The man who loved to spend the weekend in bed. Who loved to laugh. At anything. At Howard Stern. At Family Circus. Uproariously. Oh, god, it all comes back. He ran a chain of semisuccessful tanning salons. At the time, the differences between UVB and UVA light seemed far more thrilling than James Fenimore Cooper’s use of the simile. What did I know? I’m sure I gave myself melanoma as a result of that relationship.
“You are unbelievable! I can’t believe this! Everybody’s slept around except me. Even my own mother! Mom, listen to me. I am twenty-one years old. I’m not ready to throw in the towel. I’ve had only two lovers my whole life—”
“Two!” I interrupted. “You were sleeping with someone in high school?”
“Of course not. You know I could barely speak to anyone without breaking out in hives.”
“Well, that’s what I thought.”
“Aren’t you going to ask me when?”
“Fine. When?”
She stared me right in the eye, defiant.
“Last week.”
“Is that what this is all about?”
“No.”
“Does Vincent know?”
“Yes.”
“And what does he have to say about it?”
“That he loves me. That he wants to work it out.”
Relieved, I said, “Annie, you have to get a grip here. This isn’t a game. Having sex doesn’t turn you into a grown-up.” Then it all became clear.
“Not your father, please. Please say it wasn’t him filling your head with this garbage.”
Annie was quiet.
“Oh, this is perfect. Your father, the world’s leading expert on screwing around. Getting advice from him on commitment—good thinking, Annie.”
“Mom, from what I understand, you weren’t totally blameless.”
“Is that what he says?”
“Before he knew what was happening, you were moving him into married student housing.”
“I was moving him in! Give me a break! If only I had been that Machiavellian.”
“Mother.”
“Yes, I was crazy about him. You know that. He was rich and handsome and a grad student at a famous university no one from my rinky-dink high school was ever going to go to. But I wanted his life more than I wanted him.”
“What are you saying?”
“That I hardly aspired to being the wife, the one who passed on college so she could perfect her mashed potatoes while everybody else went to great lectures and read great books and had great conversations about important things.”
“You do make amazing mashed potatoes, Mom.”
“That’s not the point and you know it. Oh, it is so like your father to twist everything around just to get you to think he’s the aggrieved party. And to screw up your own good marriage in the process!”
“Okay, maybe I was harsh. I’m sorry. But this is exactly my point. I don’t want to make sacrifices, like you had to. Remember how you told me Della Street turned down five marriage proposals because she didn’t want to give up her job? I’m with her, Mother. And I’m truly sorry if you don’t like it.”
“Back up a minute, sister. Della Street is a fictional character. You’re not her, and no one is asking you to give anything up. Vincent is not your father. And you are not me. Your life has not been one huge accident, for one thing.” Shit. Now I was sorry.
“Thanks a heap, Mother.”
“I didn’t mean it that way, honey.”
“I have a hard time buying that right now,” she said, in a tone so like my own it gave me chills.
“Look, all I mean to say is, this is you and Vincent. I know how much you love him. That doesn’t happen every day. You can’t just give it up.”
“I already have. That’s why I’m here. I’ve made up my mind.”
The door opened. Zoe, who was seven, was holding a squirmy baby August in her arms.
“Mommy’s finished the cake she’s been working on. Do you want to see it?” she asked shyly.
“No, sweetie, not right now,” I said.
“Yes, right now,” Annie said, grabbing the baby from Zoe just as he was about to do a face-plant on the hall carpet.
“This conversation isn’t over,” I insisted as we followed Zoe back to the kitchen.
“So, what do you think?” Lael asked, her blue eyes opened wide.
Poised on a card table in front of the fridge was a six-tiered wedding cake. It looked like a cascading waterfall. Each tier was covered in the thinnest layer of soft blue marzipan rippled with rings of powdered sugar, as if raindrops had fallen onto the surface. There was a large water lily on each tier, the pastillage petals lightly sprinkled with pink dusting powder. At the base of the waterfall, on either side of the royal icing splashes of water, were piles of rock candy pebbles, tinted grayish blue. At the very top of the cake were two sugar-paste dragonflies so delicate you could make out the veins on their wings.
“Exquisite,” I said.
“Amazing,” Annie offered.
Zoe looked proud.
Even baby August gurgled with pleasure.
“But Annie and I have to finish something right now,” I said.
“Not now. I’m going to lie down.”
“Well, let’s go back home. You can lie down there.”
“I’m staying here, Mom, and please don’t make a fuss about it.”
“What, and getting marriage counseling from Lael?” I blurted out. “I don’t think that’s very sensible.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Lael shot back.
“Oh, I don’t mean anything, you know that. It’s just that you’re not exactly in a position to say much, considering you’ve never bothered getting married.”
Lael held her tongue as I should have, especially considering the kids were standing right there. Slamming her pastry bag on the counter, she turned to stomp out of the room. The baby’s pacifier
fell out of his mouth at precisely that moment. He started to howl.
“I’ll get it,” I said, feeling contrite. Lael tried to beat me to it, and we collided. Zoe went to help us but slipped on some spilled silver sugar beads. Lael and I both reached for her, but not soon enough. Trying to steady herself, Zoe grabbed on to the flimsy card table, which tipped. As if in slow motion, the cake crashed to the floor.
Zoe gasped.
Tommy murmured, “Oh, man…”
Annie shot me a dagger look.
I didn’t dare speak.
Even the baby was silent. Not a peep.
“Oh, calm down, everyone,” Lael said with her usual aplomb. “It was just a trial run. The wedding’s not for two whole weeks.”
4
The next morning I woke at dawn. I was in a funk. My daughter was ruining her life and I had a date with a convicted murderer. Perhaps it was time for a run. People keep telling me exercise is beneficial. It gets the something flowing. Pheromones? Adrenaline? Something.
I pulled on my ratty blue leggings and a Testament T-shirt Annie had given me featuring the star of the show, the lion-hearted Fleet Commander Gow. My sneakers, however, were nowhere to be found. I thought they might be in the car, so I traipsed across the sopping wet lawn and soaked my socks, only to remember that I had taken them off at my desk the day before yesterday.
I tromped back through the house and out the back door, into the garage that, in a moment of madness, I’d had a couple of Lael’s handyman buddies convert into my office. The guys didn’t exactly get the glitter garden theme—Lucite desk, floors painted apple green and walls hot pink, old Pucci pillows on my whopper of an easy chair—but they pulled it off in seven weeks, built-in bookshelves and all. Still, I wouldn’t want to be back there during an earthquake. Which meant that working at my computer always felt vaguely life-threatening. Maybe that was a good thing, I don’t know.
The shoes were there. So was Mimi the cat, draped across the keyboard like an odalisque. I shooed her off, surely to suffer for it later, and checked my e-mail. There was a message from my editor, Sally, inquiring about my progress. Sly, but not that sly. The woman was obviously starting to shake in her boots. What was she, clairvoyant? For all Sally knew, everything was going fine, just fine. A month ago, she’d read the first twelve chapters and hadn’t had any complaints. In fact, she’d raved about the section on Temecula.
Gardner had bought a ranch and settled in Temecula after selling his Hollywood residence in 1936. It was a hunting, fishing, and animals-everywhere kind of place, an outdoorsman’s paradise. There was even a pet coyote named Bravo that ESG’s buddy Raymond Chandler had been especially fond of. But my editor was allergic to furry things. I think the part that riveted her was Gardner’s story about how whenever fellow writers down on their luck showed up in Temecula to borrow money the animals were delighted, but editors, well, when they showed up, the dogs knew to bite them.
I suppose a lot can change in a month. I put Sally’s e-mail in my drafts folder, which is where I put everything I don’t want to deal with. I keep hoping those messages will simply disappear. Or succumb to bit rot, which sounds so slow and painful.
In my neighborhood, you don’t need a Walkman when you go running. A clean outfit is good. A business card, better. In the course of pursuing the ever-elusive goal of physical fitness, I have made the acquaintance of decorators, podiatrists, portrait photographers, and other potentially serviceable types conveniently located within a five-mile radius of my house. But today I kept my head down. And besides, it was barely six A.M. West Hollywood is not a town of early risers. Everyone is either retired, an aspiring actor/singer/model working the dinner shift, or self-employed. No one emerges until around ten, when the streets become clogged with people heading gamely to the gym, or on their cell phones, cleaning up after their dogs.
I started perspiring after half a mile. Not a good sign. Twenty minutes more and I was sweating like a pig. I turned down a tree-lined street. Rapture. It was shady, almost dark. There was no one around, so I did the unthinkable. I stopped to catch my breath. A lone car cruised down the other side of the street, witness to my shame. The guy inside gave me the eye. I didn’t think much of it until he swung a U-turn at the corner and started driving slowly alongside me. Unnerved, I started running again. He stayed with me. I turned at the next corner. He turned, too. Great. Where was everyone? Man, these people were lazy. Home was only two blocks away, but I didn’t want him to see where I lived. Alone. And I had left the door unlocked, as usual.
I kept running. Past my house, past my neighbor’s house, onto King’s Road. He kept following. This was crazy. I was seriously out of breath now. I had a stitch in my side. He was just trying to scare me, I knew that. But it was working. I didn’t know what to do. I had no idea. I was afraid to glance his way. Maybe he’d take it as encouragement. There were no alleys to duck into, and all the underground garages along King’s had electronic gates that were shut, shut, shut. Finally, I couldn’t stop myself. I turned my head. He didn’t say a thing. He just gave me a long, lazy smile.
Screw him. There was a minimall half a block away with a Starbucks in it. They’d be open by now. I ran up to Santa Monica, clutching my sides, then crossed against the light. He was stuck on red, but as soon as the light changed, he followed, pulling his beat-up blue Camaro into the parking lot just behind me. I sat down at a table in the corner and watched him get out of the car and come inside. This wasn’t happening. He walked right up to me.
“I’m calling the police,” I said.
He didn’t answer. He went up to the counter and ordered a small cup of coffee. When the girl handed it to him, he mumbled something about changing his mind. He turned to leave, bumping his arm against me on the way out. Hard. That spot would be black and blue by tonight. And no one had noticed a thing. Just another morning in the city of the angels. Nothing out of the ordinary.
I sat there for a while, thinking how easy it is to feel safe when you’ve never been hurt. Then I picked up a paper someone had left behind and read the comics until I felt a little better, or at least too tired to think anymore, which amounted to the same thing.
I went home and showered until the hot water ran out. I wanted to stay in there, but I had an appointment to keep. It had to be today. Well, it was going to be fine. No one had promised me a walk in the park, but it would be fine.
I considered my wardrobe. According to the visitor handbook I’d downloaded from the Web, conservative attire was recommended. No clothing that in any combination of shades resembled California-issue inmate garb. No law-enforcement or military-type forest green or camouflage-patterned items. No spaghetti straps. No sheer garments. No hats, wigs, or hairpieces, except with prior written approval of the visiting sergeant. No clothing that exposed the chest, genitals, or buttocks. Party poopers.
I wondered what Joseph Albacco would be wearing. Prison blues aren’t necessarily blue. I knew. I’d read up on it. They come in orange, red, or white, according to the unit in which the particular prisoner is housed. It helps correctional officers determine if a serial killer, say, isn’t where he’s supposed to be. That was the principle behind stripes as well, which were worn by convicts well into the first half of the twentieth century. The types of stripes (vertical or horizontal) and their combinations (horizontal on pants, vertical on shirts) likewise signified things like crime committed or time served. It was kind of the reverse of the old saying that clothes make the man.
After mulling it over for a while, I dropped my towel on the floor and put on something that made me feel strong—a brown velvet Chanel suit with lots of white braid trim. I had snagged it from my mother’s cousin Drena, who’d bought it at a rummage sale, only to decide it made her look like a three-star general.
She had underestimated the genius of Coco Chanel. That made two of us. I looked less like Patton than a Hostess cupcake, something a convicted felon could polish off in a single bite. Thinking about the creep in t
he Camaro, I squeezed some gelatinous goo into my hands and slicked my hair into a sadistic ballet-mistress updo. Better. Forbidding. You wouldn’t want to mangle a plié within ten yards of me.
Enough with the metaphors. Joseph Albacco, Prisoner #C-36789, currently serving thirty-five to life for murder in the first degree, was waiting. For me.
5
I knew the court transcript like the back of my hand.
December 13, 1957. It was a Friday. The forecast had predicted rain, but little on that day happened according to plan. By noon, the early-morning clouds had dissipated and the sun was shining. Jean Albacco spent most of the day answering the phone, typing letters, and filing correspondence at the insurance offices of Gilbert, Finster, and Johnson on lower State Street in downtown Ventura, where she had been employed since graduating from high school a year and a half earlier. On December 13, she worked through lunch, having asked her employer, Mr. Douglas Gilbert, if she could leave one hour earlier that evening. It was her first wedding anniversary, and she was preparing a surprise for her husband, Joe.
Jean’s coworker and best friend, Miss Madeleine Seaton, remembered Jean being somewhat edgy all day, but that wouldn’t have been unusual. Jean was known for being high-strung and particular about things. Miss Seaton recalled her spilling a cup of coffee on a stack of unmailed letters early that morning, and accidentally disconnecting Mr. Gilbert’s wife, who had called at 11:00 A.M. to remind her husband about a dentist appointment that afternoon. Perhaps, Miss Seaton speculated, it was just that Jean had errands to do after work and was worried about everything getting done before her husband came home. Joe was expected at approximately 7:15 P.M.
It was only later that everyone realized the day Jean Albacco was murdered had been Friday the thirteenth.
