I stayed by the door, keeping an eye on the car. “I got permission to take a videocamera into Juvenile Hall Wednesday morning when I talk to Tyrone. Thought you might want to ride along. I can pick you up around eight.”
“Wednesday?” She looked over Baby Boy as if measuring him, deciding how much of him would be left by Wednesday morning. Her gaze turned back to me. “What else you want, honey?”
“Did you watch the news tonight?” I asked.
“The news?” Etta’s head bobbled. “I didn’ watch no news. We was busy, wasn’ we Baby Boy?”
“Yes we was.” Baby Boy laughed, a deep rumble like rolling boulders.
“I’m sorry you missed it,” I said. “A few seconds of the interview you did for me got picked up and attached to a piece on Charles Conklin. You were on the six o’clock news, Etta, calling the police motherfuckers.”
“Hey, baby,” Baby Boy grinned. “You was on the TV.”
Etta raised a hand for him to slap. She was bombed but not too anesthetized to drag up a reaction.
“Thought I should warn you,” I said. “The district attorney has attached his star to Charles Conklin’s grievance. If reporters want more of your story, it won’t take them long to find you. They can swarm over you like angry bees. Trust me, it could get intense.”
“Like how?” she asked.
“Relentless questions, film crews dogging you, people looking in your windows, going through your trash, snooping into your personal business. You won’t have any secrets left to tell.”
“As long as Pinkie gets out the jail, I don’ care what they do.”
“Pinkie is Charles Conklin?” I asked.
She nodded. “What I say?”
“Do you believe he’s innocent?” I asked.
“Don’t care about that, neither.” She slurred her words less as her apparent interest level rose. “Where he is now, he don’t pay no child support. He don’t do nothin’ to help bring up the boy. I want his ass out here where he be some use to me.”
“Tell me about Mr. Conklin,” I said.
“Got nothin’ to say about him.” With the bottle, she was waving me away. But she kept talking. “He is scandalous. I told my girl to stay outta his way. He was dealin’, rennin’ my baby on the street, stealin’ cars. He was sent up for messin’ with his own little girl.”
“Roll that by me again,” I said. “The little girl part.”
“He went to jail for messin’ with this little girl,” she said, her pitch rising at the end. “Left my girl with a baby when he got arrested. She was only fourteen herself.”
“Besides Tyrone, he has a daughter?”
“He has a lotsa kids. An’ he don’t take care of none of them.”
“Nice guy. this Charles Conklin.” I began to relax for Mike a little. Even the most egregious sob sister or opportunist, Roddy O’Leary included, couldn’t make a media hero and martyr out of a child-abusing pimp.
Etta refortified herself with a long pull from her bottle. When she put the bottle down again, she seemed surprised to see me still there. “Was there somethin’ else?”
“That’s about it,” I said. “Except, maybe you should get yourself a lawyer.”
“Me?”
“You may need to protect yourself, Etta, if the sleaze TV people come asking you to sign exclusive interview agreements with them. They can be tricky.”
“What did you call that?”
“An exclusive agreement.”
“Is that like the paper you had me sign?”
“No. You signed a release form giving me the right to commercial use of the interview we taped. It doesn’t keep you from giving interviews to other people.”
“If I sign a’ exclusion thing with you, will those reporters you told me about stay away from me?”
“Not necessarily. Anyway, I can’t pay you for an exclusive. The best I can offer is to put you up in a hotel for a while if things get hinky,” I said, hoping I had a credit card that wasn’t coaxed out if it came to that. “You could take a little vacation until the press loses interest and moves on.”
She smiled at the idea. “I ain’t had no vacation in a long time.”
Baby Boy had a gleam in his eye.
I was ready to go pack her a bag, even though hiding her away was a risky idea that could backfire on all of us if the story got hot. I kept talking. “Go to legal aid tomorrow and get a lawyer before you do anything.”
“Hold on one minute.” Baby Boy took a step toward me. “You say you don’t have money. But those TV people do. A lot of money.”
“How much?” Etta demanded.
“Depends on what you have to say and how badly they want it,” I said. “Anywhere from a few hundred dollars to tens of thousands.”
“They gonna ax me about Tyrone, the way you done?”
“Probably not,” I said. “They’ll want to talk about Charles Conklin and the police who sent him to prison. The district attorney is saying the police threatened the witnesses to make them identify Charles. Do you know who those officers were?”
“Yes I do. Officer Flint and Officer Kelsey. I know them for a long time.”
“They must have questioned you and your daughter, maybe some of your neighbors. Did you ever hear anyone say Officer Flint threatened them? Mistreated anyone? Forced them to change their testimony?”
“He’s the police,” she said, shrugging. “You know how they are.”
“No, I don’t know,” I said. “Suppose you tell me.”
“Uh huh.” Etta, who had been very serious and very blase through the entire conversation, finally gave me her beautiful, big, toothy smile. “Now let me ax you a question. Did Officer Flint ever mistreat you?”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I’m beginnin’ to understand what you doin’ here. He told me you was his lady now. I think I better take your advice and get me a lawyer before I talk to anyone. Includin’ you.”
“You catch on fast,” I said. “Just one more question, and it has nothing to do with the other business. I’ve been looking for a woman named Hanna Rhodes. She grew up in the projects. She would be twenty-four or twenty-five years old now. Do you know her or her family? The last address for her grandmother is on Grape Street.”
“Hanna?” Etta looked up at Baby Boy before she answered. “Go look in Sybil Brand or Frontera. She in the joint more than she out.”
“Thanks,” I said. “What about Wednesday morning? Do you want to come to Juvenile Hall with me?”
“We’ll see,” she said, flirting at Baby Boy. “We’ll see.”
Smooth dismissal gambit: Baby Boy opened the screen door and held it for me. “Thanks for comin’ by.”
“Bye, Etta,” I said, walking out past Baby Boy. “I’ll be in touch.”
No one bothered me on the walk back to my car, not with Baby Boy standing in the doorway watching. I was grateful to him, and grateful that the car was intact. I wasted not a step, not a movement getting to the car and inside with the doors locked behind me. The engine started, the lights came on, reverse worked, so did drive. I sighed; none of my doomsday scenarios had happened.
I had a moment’s pause, however, when I noticed that the boys who had harassed me going in were sitting on the grass eating coconut cake and drinking Dr. Pepper.
Chapter 8
At eleven, when I got back to Encino, the night was still warm and the condo grounds were still deserted. I had expected people to be outside when the air had cooled off, to walk or swim, or get blasted al fresco. If they had come out, they had gone back inside early. The quiet was beautiful. I walked straight to the pool.
Again, no one. For a change, there were no splashing toddlers, no cocktail-hour schmoozers and oglers, no senior watercisers. Simply, no one. Such a rare circumstance left me with no alternative: I stripped to bra and bikini panties, black ones, and dove into the cool still water.
The first lap was heavy going. My arms seemed weighted and I couldn’t find my rhythm
. By the third lap, I was moving easily, loose and strong. I didn’t bother to count turns, I just swam like a machine until my thighs were full of fire and my shoulder muscles froze up from fatigue.
At the point where I could not swim another stroke, I stopped in the middle of the pool, rolled onto my back, and looked up into the black and starless night. I floated while I caught my breath, my heaving chest sending ripples around me.
The pool was a delicious luxury. So was the solitude. I thought about the kids at Jordan Downs who had access to neither. I suffered a flash of guilt for the pleasure I was having, a pang akin to the stab I felt when Oscar said “la-di-da” when I told him what my parents do. He had meant it as a put-down.
I wasn’t born poor, nor was I born rich. We were hardworking comfortable, somewhere in that range where children might have ponies but weren’t taken skiing in St. Moritz. I was never coddled or spoiled. I never went hungry. In my heart I knew I had nothing to be ashamed of. But, as Guido had pointed out, my heart still bled for everyone else.
Relaxed to the point of sleepiness, I hauled myself out of the water, slipped into my shirt, gathered my things, and stumbled home.
Michael was asleep on the living room sofa. He had ceded his bedroom to Casey, how willingly I wasn’t sure. I suspect that it had been Mike’s idea, born out of a notion that girls need more privacy than boys, some stubborn remnant of chivalry. Whatever, it was a noble gesture, a big help in the short run. I felt very strongly that we had to find Michael a space of his own, and soon.
We were looking for a bigger house.
From habit, I checked on Casey, saw her sleeping in the usual tangle with Bowser. I yawned, wiped away the water running down my neck, and opened my own bedroom door. The elves had cleaned up Bowser’s mess, refolded the bath towels and stacked them on the floor.
Mike, wearing only boxer shorts, was stretched out on the bed, propped up on pillows and surrounded by street maps, the newspaper classifieds, and a couple of rental guides. He had reading glasses perched low on his nose. When I leaned over to kiss his bare shoulder I dripped water onto his reading matter.
“Is it raining?” he asked.
“I went for a swim.”
“Naked?”
“Almost. You should have been there.”
“If you’d whistled, I would have been.”
“There was no time,” I said, beginning to shiver. “It was an emergency sort of thing.”
“I can understand that,” he said. “Feel better?”
“Much.” I peeled off my soggy shirt and underwear and started for the bathroom.
“Where’ve you been?” he called after me. “Out.”
Mike’s big terry robe was on a hook in the bathroom. I put it on, wrapped a towel around my hair, and went back to the bed. Still shivering, I slipped under the covers and snuggled up against Mike, stealing his body warmth.
When I had quit squirming and had my cold feet wedged under him, he said, “Out?”
“I went to Etta’s.”
“Guido go?”
“No. I went alone.”
I might as well have hit him across the face. “You went to Etta’s alone?” he exploded.
“Etta does it all the time.”
“Jesus Christ, Maggie. Promise me you won’t ever go there alone again.”
“Okay.”
“I used to work that neighborhood. You have no idea what can happen.”
“I said, okay. I won’t go there alone again.”
“Okay.”
He was still breathing hard when he enveloped me in his arms. He muttered, “Jesus,” a couple of times, most unprayerfully. He needn’t have fussed; I would never go back there alone. I had been scared from the moment I got off the freeway until I got back on it. With reason. I could add up at least four incidents that occurred during the space of an hour that might easily have gone deadly wrong. That’s four possibilities before I gave any thought to car problems or drive-bys. Mike was right: Etta’s neighborhood was no place to wander through alone, at night. I should have known better.
All my moving around under the covers scattered his maps and classifieds. I retrieved a section of ads sliding off my hip: houses and apartments to rent, three bedrooms. He had starred a few.
“Find anything?” I asked.
He shook his head. “The geography’s the tricky part. You want a canyon or ocean view out of the smog belt. Michael has to be within easy commuting distance of Occidental in Eagle Rock. Casey needs access to Pasadena. I don’t want to spend my life on the freeway. The neighborhood has to be reasonably safe. We need at least three bedrooms, but we can’t spend much more than we’ll get in rent for this place, assuming we find a renter. Any ideas?”
“One thought,” I said. “If we find something big enough, I won’t have to rent an office. I miss working from home. When I have to work late, it’s so much easier to keep track of Casey if I’m in the next room instead of down the freeway. God, I’m beginning to hate the freeway.”
With a comer of the towel he dabbed at water on my cheek. “Sounds like regrets.”
“What sort of regrets?” I asked.
“Moving down. You miss your own house.”
“I miss order.” I played with the little patch of hair at the base of his throat. “I wish the elves would come in and move us to a cottage in the woods somewhere, do the laundry, drive Casey around while they’re at it, because the details are beginning to overwhelm me. That’s a long way from regret. Remember what I told you when we decided to live in sin?”
“Let me think.” He rested his chin on my wrapped head. “You said that you wouldn’t care if we had to sleep on army cots in an abandoned airplane hangar, as long as we could wake up together every morning.”
“Something like that,” I said.
“An airplane hangar would give us more space than we have here.”
“Look into it, will you?”
“Yeah.” He gathered the ads and maps and dropped them off the side of the bed.
“How was your meeting with the lieutenant?” I asked as he slid between the sheets and snuggled into me.
He found my breast inside the robe and covered it with his warm hand. “You don’t really want to talk about all that now, do you?”
“Actually, I do,” I said. “What did the lieutenant say?”
Mike frowned and rolled onto his back. “We didn’t get very far. He wanted to go over the case with me, check our procedures. Then he told me to take some time off. I can come with you to Casey’s orientation tomorrow. Maybe we can spend the rest of the day house hunting.”
“Time off? Like a suspension?”
“Not at all like a suspension. Just until things cool off, I’m going to be invisible. One thing you have to understand: As far as the department is concerned, I’m not in any trouble. They’re taking good care of me, because they believe me.”
“That’s okay,” I said. “But if you disappear, won’t it look like the department is hiding something, keeping you under wraps?”
“You know, we did some things differently in the old days when our job was keeping the peace instead of holding teat-to-teats with the bad guys to keep their feelings from getting hurt.”
“That’s a new one.” I laughed, getting a strong visual. Teat to teat was a definite improvement on head to head.
“You know what I mean,” he groused, but not serious about it.
“I know what you mean. You used to kick butt and take names later, or something.”
“Kick ass,” he corrected. “Kick ass.”
I had to ask: “Did you kick Charles Conklin’s ass?”
“I just helped him decide it was time to move out of the neighborhood. The witnesses were little kids and he kept them terrorized. Soon as he was gone, they couldn’t talk fast enough. They saw Conklin at the scene with a gun in his hand. They saw him run away. We had a jail-house snitch to corroborate them and, boom, we nailed Conklin, dead bang.”
“
The D.A. says you intimidated the kids.”
“Didn’t have to. The girls came clean, that’s all.”
The girls. Hearing that made something click. Two girls, ages ten or eleven, about fourteen years ago. So, okay, I was a philosophy major, but I can still add about ten and about fourteen. Comes to about twenty-four.
Feeling something between befuddlement and anger, I scooted out of bed to get my bag. I pulled out the newspaper copies and, sitting with my back against Mike’s raised knees, I sorted through them.
“It’s weird, Mike,” I said, hearing sarcasm. I passed him the three short news items about the shooting of Officer Johnson. “I thought that when a police officer was shot everyone made a big fuss about it. Big funeral with thousands of officers in uniform, a eulogy by the chief, grieving family on TV, a motorcade, bagpipes—the whole twenty-dollar package. Johnson got none of that. Why not?”
“A few things.” Mike put his glasses back on and began reading through the articles. “Like I told you, Johnson was off duty and out of uniform when he got it. Second, we thought he might have been up to something dirty.”
“Dirty with Charles Conklin?”
“Don’t know. We didn’t pursue it once we had an arrest. You have any idea what our caseloads are like?”
“But a fellow officer was shot. Surely that meant something. Another thing, there was nothing in the paper about Conklin’s arrest. When did you get him?”
“About a year after the fact. Jail-house snitch came looking for a deal, spilled for us.”
“I’m so disappointed,” I said, nudging him to make room in the bed; he seemed to have spread out. “Where were you great big detectives all that time? Out eating doughnuts?”
“If it had been my case from the beginning, we would have gotten Conklin on day one.” Mike sounded defensive. “The original investigators screwed up on it, got lazy I think, didn’t follow up on leads. They talked to Conklin, but they let him go. The department did a six-month follow-up, then filed the case away for another six months. It probably would have stayed in limbo, except Chuckie Conklin got himself sent to jail on an unrelated charge—crimes against a child—and couldn’t keep his mouth shut. To keep from getting poop-chuted all day like the other pedophiles, he started bragging that he had taken out a cop.”
Bad Intent Page 6
