Bad Intent

by Wendy Hornsby

  “I have worked with kids like Tyrone Harkness for almost twenty years,” she said, chin up, shoulders straight with a slenderizing half-turn to the camera. “It doesn’t matter how bright they are, kids from disorganized families are destined from the first day of school to drop out, to lose job after job, because no one teaches them the organizational skills necessary to get to school or to work on time. You must learn how to get up at a certain hour, budget the time it takes to wash, dress, eat, gather school materials, and proceed directly to school.”

  Her intensity edged her forward in her seat. “‘On-time-ness’ is not a goal that can be reached with a good lecture on promptness and a reliable alarm clock. It must be taught consistently at an early age. Parents who go to work every day, who serve meals on schedule, and enforce bedtime, these parents teach time-management skills by example.

  “Until he was sent to Juvenile Hall, no one ever told Tyrone when to eat or sleep or what time to get up so he could get to school on time. He ate when he was hungry, slept when he dropped. And school? He got there when he got there. Listen to his language. When he speaks, he uses only the present tense, as if he is without past and without future.”

  I said, “Tyrone told me how he plans to go away to a better place. That doesn’t sound like present-mindedness.”

  “You’re right, it doesn’t,” Westman said. “But I’ll lay odds that he was repeating a story someone else told him. ‘Someday, son …’ But Tyrone doesn’t have any idea where someday is. Was he getting organized for his move? Did he have a plan of action worked out?”

  “He was in Juvenile Hall on a murder charge.”

  She raised her hands as if to say, I told you so. “Tyrone kept getting caught by the police because he never planned his crimes. He might know that the best time to rob is bank is when it opens at ten, but he would have no idea how to get there at ten. Arriving sometime between eight and noon for a ten o’clock appointment is not precise enough for success, even for a bank robber. His crimes tended to be crimes of opportunity, because he didn’t know how to carry off a timely plan.”

  Linda Westman gave me good background to use. I was glad I hadn’t rescheduled. We talked for a good hour, and could have taped a second, if I’d had the time. When the lights were turned off, she stood up and stretched.

  “That was fun,” she said.

  “You’re a natural. You should be in sales.”

  She laughed. “All teachers are salesmen.”

  On our way out, I offered her a soda from the machine instead of taking her out for coffee somewhere. I needed to be home. She invited me to drop by her classes at Juvenile Hall some morning, and dictated her schedule to me. Without setting a date, we said good-bye.

  As soon as I walked into the house, Mike and Michael went out to buy paint. Casey was in the hall, working out on her barre. I sat down on the floor out of her kicking range to watch.

  “So?” I asked her. “What do you think?”

  “About?”

  “School, the house, Los Angeles, Monsieur Flint, life?”

  “I like the house,” she said. “It’s pretty old, but Mike showed me how he’s going to make a studio for me. That’s cool, but why does Michael get a whole house of his own?”

  “You’re too young to fly so far from the nest.”

  “Oh, right. His house is only in the backyard.”

  “Michael is an adult, Casey. If his school tuition wasn’t so expensive he would be living away from home. Don’t you think he needs his own place?”

  “That’s one of those trick questions. Yeah, I think he needs his own place. But so do I.”

  “You’ll have two big rooms to yourself. Much more space than the cottage.”

  “And it’s right next to you.”

  “Yep.” I leaned back against the wall. “Show me some of your stuff.”

  “Watch this.” She unfurled one of her amazing legs up from the side until it was straight up, nearly touching the ceiling. “I can finally do it. Mischa showed me how to lengthen the hamstring.

  “Looks like it hurts,” I said. “The ceilings in the new house are taller.”

  She snapped her leg down. “Do I have to go to Dad’s this weekend?”

  “That’s the agreement. You haven’t been to Denver for over a month.”

  “One more week?”

  I held my hands up to her. “That’s between you and your dad. But isn’t it easier to go now than later in the semester? When do you start weekend workshops?”

  She crumpled to the floor beside me. “I hate going to Dad’s. Linda hates me. The kid’s a brat.”

  “I thought you liked being a big sister.”

  She gave me a withering glare.

  I leaned my head against the wall. “All weekend we’re going to be house painting. Is Denver worse than house painting?”

  “You know what I really want to do? I want to spend the weekend with Lyle in our own house.” From out of nowhere, she started to cry. “I want to see my friends.”

  I put my arm around her and pulled her head down to my shoulder. “You’ve had a lot of changes to get used to all at once.”

  “I hate this crappy condo,” she sniffed.

  “Me, too,” I said.

  She looked up at me, surprised. “You do?”

  “Sure. What’s to love about it except the people in it?”

  Casey wiped her face with the tail of her tee shirt. “Michael told me what a bitch his stepmother is.”

  “Is she worse than Linda?” I asked, using her shirt to get a wet spot she missed.

  “Actually.” A pause to think it over. “Linda’s okay. Ever since she had the baby, she hasn’t been as jealous of me and Dad. Sometimes she’s almost nice to me.”

  “So, what about Denver this weekend?”

  She took in a deep breath and exhaled it. “I guess.”

  “Pack tonight. I’ll have your bag in the car when I pick you up at school tomorrow. We’ll go straight to the Burbank Airport. Plane leaves at four-thirty.”

  She said she was hungry, so we got into the car and drove down to Ventura Boulevard for ice cream cones at Ben and Jerry’s. We window-shopped while we ate them. The Santa Ana winds had calmed down, letting in a little ocean breeze to take the edge off the heat wave. The sidewalk still radiated some warmth a couple of hours after sunset, but we didn’t have to hurry through our chocolate-cookie-crunch cones before they melted.

  Linking my arm through hers, I said, “I miss our ocean view.”

  “I miss walking down to the marina to hear the steel bands,” she countered.

  “I hate the smog.”

  “I won’t miss San Francisco fog, though,” she offered. “I like Mike.”

  “Me, too.”

  She smiled into my face, a smudge of ice cream at the corner of her mouth. “We’re going to be okay, Mom.” Out of the mouths of babes.

  Chapter 22

  All day Friday, I drove around with Casey’s suitcase in the back of my car. I found myself looking at it as if it were some kind of time bomb, set to go off at four-thirty.

  Casey had been flying alone to Denver for regular, court-ordered visits for almost three years. I dreaded every trip. One time, the plane had had engine trouble and had to turn back after take-off. Twice, Scottie had misplaced her and she hadn’t arrived home on schedule. At that point I had quit worrying about not having a pension; I knew I wasn’t going to last long enough to collect one.

  According to the custody agreement, Casey had to spend sixty days a year with her father until she reached her sixteenth year. At the end of October, Casey would be fifteen.

  First thing in the morning, I had a long talk with the producers of L.A. Hot. They gave me a lot to think about, but I wasn’t ready to commit to them.

  Around noon, when I got to my office, I found a series of messages on my machine from Ralph Faust at Satellite Network News. The tone increased in urgency as the morning progressed.

  I called Guido first,
found him at work in his trailer at UCLA. He said was feeling a hundred percent again, but would fake something if I needed him. I told him about the L.A. Hot conversation.

  “Don’t give away the store,” he said. “Run your minute on the news, then let’s see what surfaces.”

  I put his advice away with a lot of other unsolicited information I had been offered.

  I called Ralph.

  “Jungle drums are beating,” he said in his smarmy tone. “Word is, you have some dynamite shit relating to Conklin.” “Says who?” I asked him.

  “What do you have?”

  “The thing is, Ralph, you gave me a pretty good lesson on media ethics the other night.” I was speaking slowly, intentional counterpoint to his hyper state. “I may be, as you said, a baby in this industry, but I’m a quick learner. Besides, I may already have a buyer.”

  “Be careful, Maggie. Conklin is a buzzer today, but by Monday he could be a dead story. I’m ready to talk time and money right now. Big time, big money.”

  “I’ll put you in the line-up, Ralph. I have your number. We’ll talk later.” I hung up.

  The phone began to ring immediately. Thinking it was probably Ralph, I let it go onto the machine, heard the hang-up.

  I slipped the tape of James Shabazz into the player, then I dialed Guido.

  “Sorry to hear about your relapse,” I said when he picked up. “Guess you went back to work too soon.”

  “Oh yeah? How serious is it?”

  “I need you,” I said. “Will you collect all the project tapes and stills you have at your house and bring everything to my office? We have a lot to do and no time to do it.”

  “You must be right. I came back to work much too soon. There are a few things I really need to deal with, though, so give me a couple of hours. I’ll be there as soon as. Keep the faith.”

  I paged Mike. While I waited for his return call, I listened to Shabazz and paced.

  “What’s up?” Mike asked when I picked up. The connection, from his car phone, was fuzzy.

  “This thing I’ve been working on?” I said. “Well, a piece of it’s going to be on the news today. Starting at four.”

  “Congratulations. What is it, some kind of promotion for the documentary?”

  “Don’t congratulate me. I should have told you right away, but I want to be able to say that you had no input and no prior knowledge.”

  “What the hell?” He was worried then.

  “I’ve made a short rebuttal to the assertions of the district attorney and the reverend private eye. I hope it offers enough to keep Conklin from becoming a media heart throb.”

  Mike’s voice sounded overly controlled. “Am I mentioned?”

  “Mentioned? No. But Jerry Kelsey is.”

  “How’d he get so lucky?”

  “I had a serious lapse in my professional detachment.”

  “Oh?”

  “It has to do with a serious personal attachment.”

  “I love you, Maggie,” he said. “Have you gone and gotten me fired?”

  “I hope not. There is a shot of your back for maybe two seconds. Half the women in the city will probably recognize it, even with clothes on it, but not to worry. I need you to warn Hector. And don’t forget to watch at four. I’ll be at the airport seeing Casey off, then I’ll be in my office maybe by five—depends on traffic.”

  “Wouldn’t miss this one,” he said. “Hector’s here, working on the house with everybody. We’ll go find a TV at four. Be all of us together when we get our pensions yanked.”

  I laughed. “You’re so dramatic.” One thing I have learned, though, is that short-timer policemen don’t joke about losing their pensions.

  When he said good-bye, Mike sounded weary.

  For maybe fifteen minutes, while I waited for Guido, I lay on the floor with my eyes closed and thought about how we were going to proceed. The general framework was clear to me. In my mind, I began fleshing out the framework, recreating a night fifteen years ago, putting meat on the major players. I had nearly everything that I needed on tape or in a still photograph. Everything except LaShonda DeBevis and a few background details.

  I followed LaShonda’s telephone number trail again, starting at the Lennox Library, then Hacienda Heights, finally Valencia. No one had seen or heard from LaShonda, but all of them took a message to have her call me if they did hear anything. I didn’t know what else I could do.

  My back-up shooter, Thieu, called and reminded me that we had scheduled a shoot in Reseda—Charles Conklin’s younger brother, Bartholomew. I lied and said I hadn’t forgotten, that I was on my way. I left a note for Guido and headed out the freeway to meet Bartholomew Conklin.

  “Pinkie? Pinkie was always scammin’.” Bartholomew was on his lunch break from his mail delivery route in Reseda. He was a long, thin, athletically built man. He had shaved his whole head, but I could see from the relative smoothness of the dome that he was nearly bald, anyway.

  Visually, it was a good scene: against a backdrop of gray smog, the many-colored streaks of passing traffic, the stationary red, white, and blue postal service Jeep parked at the curb, Bartholomew’s summer uniform of post-office-blue shorts and short-sleeved shirt, white knee socks and black sneakers. He leaned against the Jeep, long legs extended, crossed at the ankle. Casual, good-humored.

  I was worried about the traffic noise, so I attached a body mike to him. The battery pack and cord were concealed inside his shirt, the mike itself was a tiny black clip on his collar. Thieu filmed him from over my shoulder so that Bartholomew would have the entire screen.

  “What do you mean by scamming?” I asked.

  “You know, always trying to get something for nothing,” Bartholomew said, squinting into the sun. “Pinkie is the laziest sombitch on earth. If he spent half as much time working as he spent figuring out how to make other people work for him, he could be a rich man instead of a con.”

  “He had young women working the streets for him,” I said. “Is that what you mean?”

  “Could be.” He studied his feet for a moment. Even when he started to talk again, his focus was off to the side, an oblique response. He said, “One time I remember, Pinkie was short on cash, didn’t have a job, wasn’t about to go out and look for one, either. Took to hangin’ up by the 7-Eleven. Just stand there all night, panhandling some so he could buy a beer now and then. But watching—that’s all, just watching and waiting. Like a fox waits.

  “Then one night he’s standing there, sees what he’s been waiting for all that time. He sees two dudes go in, hold up the place. He watches it go down, slides himself over to the dudes’ car, and waits for them to come out. They come out in a hurry with a grocery bag full of money. He pulls his gun, high-jacks them, takes the money they stole, drives away in their car. They were still standing there like fools, trying to figure what the hell happened, when the police drove up and arrested them.”

  “What happened to your brother?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Not one thing. Who’s going to take the word of two thieves that they were held up?” An embarrassed laugh. “Pinkie is bad, but he’s good at it. If you get my meaning.”

  “Are you close to your brother?” I asked.

  Bartholomew shook his head. “Nowadays, you would say we were a dysfunctional family. Back then, well, no one ever said anything. Anyway, I never spent much time with Pinkie. I was enough younger I couldn’t hang with him.

  “Most of the time, Pinkie was in jail for one thing and another. And when he wasn’t in jail, he was out on the streets looking for trouble. No, we’re not close.”

  “Do you talk to him?”

  He shrugged. “Nothing to talk about.”

  He was reflective, a nice transition to the next question. I said to him, “By all measure, you’re a successful man. You finished high school, you’ve worked at the same job for over ten years. You have a home, wife, children.”

  “Pension, health plan, two-car garage.” He said this with an at
tractive, humorous lilt. “You make it sound boring.”

  “Not as boring as prison. You have the same background as your brother. What made things so different for you?”

  Again, he was thoughtful. When he had an answer, he looked straight at me. “My father was the meanest bastard on this earth. A bodacious drunk. Beat us, hurt us, called us every name in the book, and then some. Beat all us kids, beat our mother, too. Why she stayed with him, I don’t know, but she did. The thing is, Pinkie, being older, well he took the worst of it. By the time I came along, the old man was plain old worn-out. Running on empty. I had a couple of older sisters to protect me some, too. Being the baby, I guess, saved me.

  “When I was about five or six, my mother died and, if it was possible for things to get worse, it got worse. Sometimes, you know, good things come out of bad, because it got so bad that people had to take some notice. The school called the police about the condition we were in when we showed up. The County came and told my father he had to give us up. Pinkie was already living on his own. My sisters went to live with my aunt in Oakland. And I was taken in by a saint, older man who lived in the neighborhood; fed my puny body, fed my undernourished soul.”

  There were tears in his eyes and Thieu came in close to get them. “You said I’m a success. Well, if that is true, then all the credit belongs to Brother James Shabazz.”

  I repeated the name, “James Shabazz,” because I knew it was coming.

  In these stories I had collected, Charles Conklin and James Shabazz were point-counterpoint. William Blake came to mind again, speaking of the tiger: “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Bartholomew gave me a lot to think about.

  Bartholomew had only a forty-minute break, so the entire meeting was short. I was back at my office within two hours of the time I left.

  When Guido finally arrived, he had his arms full of materials and his own ideas. During the course of the afternoon, we had some noisy clashes, but productive ones. My strength is the message, his the craft. Together we make one hell of a filmmaker. And, together, that afternoon, we did what we do best.