“I saw your story on the news,” he said. “Pretty spooky.”
“Very spooky. Stay watchful. If you get home before your dad or me, call me here at the office. The way things are, I don’t want you to be home alone at night.”
“Don’t worry. I’m spending the weekend at my mom’s. Didn’t Casey tell you?”
“Not in so many words.” Vaguely, I remembered her saying something about me and Mike being alone for the weekend.
“Be careful anyway. Any ideas where I might find Mike?”
“No. Sorry. Probably just has his pager turned off.”
“Probably,” I said, followed by good-bye.
LaShonda and Guido announced that they were hungry. I was hungry, too, but I didn’t want to leave in case Mike called. The two of them went to dinner without me, promising to bring me back something.
When the door was locked behind them, I took out a large schedule book and began plotting out our post-production requirements, making a work schedule, what Linda Westman would call a time budget.
Almost immediately, the phone began to ring. Lana Howard called to say the response to the broadcast amounted to a groundswell. Jack Riley said he was impressed anew by my wickedness. Baron Marovich’s campaign chair, Roddy O’Leary, announced that he planned to sue me. An anonymous caller promised to blow my fucking head off. Ralph Faust invited me to dinner with his people to talk about a job.
I used the phone myself twice, to page Mike again and to make sure Casey had arrived at her father’s house in Denver. After that, I left it on the machine and monitored calls, paying only enough attention to listen for Mike.
Around nine, about the time I was thinking Guido and LaShonda were taking a lot of time to eat, I got up. Feeling restless, I turned on a tape player, scanned through LaShonda’s interview until I got to the part that kept jabbing me.
“He scared me,” she said, referring to Mike. “I was just a little kid. My mother always told me to watch out for strangers, and he was a stranger to me. I had never spoken to a white man before he came by. He was big, he talked different from the people I knew, sounded just like my teacher, and she scared the you-know-what out of me every day. I can’t say whether the officer did anything, or said anything that I would see as a threat if I heard it now, but back then, everything he said seemed like a threat. But I was still more scared of Pinkie.
“I remember talk about a bicycle.” She dropped her head so her voice faded. “My mother got mad whenever I asked her about it. All I know is, I’ve never had a bike in my whole life. Never learned to ride one.
“And I remember the day I finally told the officer what he wanted to hear. He came by school and told me Pinkie was gone, and if I wanted to keep him away forever I had to talk.”
I asked: “Did you tell him what he wanted to hear, or did you tell him the truth?”
“A little of both.”
I was concentrating so hard that I startled when I heard a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” I shouted.
“Jennifer Miller,” came the answer, but quiet, pressed close to the doorjamb.
I thought it was a prank, but I turned off the tape and went to the door. “Are you alone?”
“Please. I don’t want to be seen here.”
I opened the door enough to make sure she was indeed Ms. Miller and that she was alone, then I opened it enough to let her slip in.
Jennifer had been crying. Her face was all ugly blotches, her hair was a mess, and her perky blouse slopped out over her waistband. I led her over to the sofa. When she set her purse on the floor at her feet, I hefted it to make sure she wasn’t packing something lethal.
I asked, “Can I get you something?”
“Yes. Cyanide.”
“Ice or straight up? Maybe mixed with scotch?”
She almost smiled. She raised her swollen eyes to meet mine. “My career is finished. Thanks to you.”
“Thank yourself. What brings you here?”
“Stupidity. When I saw your hatchet job on me, I was so furious I wanted to confront you, make you retract everything you said about me.”
“Something changed your mind?”
She began to laugh. “Traffic was bad. I took out my angst on the other drivers. Now I can’t think of anywhere else to go but here.”
“Home?” I offered. I went to the rented refrigerator and found her a root beer. “What about your own office?”
“Can’t.” She took the can from me. “Everyone is gunning for me. This is the last place anyone would look for me. I need some time to think.”
I was standing in the middle of the room. “Do you want to talk about it?”
When she shook her head, I went back to my calendar and tried to pick up the thread. The telephone rang, the machine clicked on. As soon as I knew it wasn’t Mike, I turned down the volume a few notches, and went back to my work. I had no more than found where I left off when Jennifer said, “I knew better.”
I didn’t look up. “Did you?”
“This case was supposed to be a major step up for me. Major. I knew from the beginning Conklin was assigned to me only because none of the partners or senior staff in the firm wanted to touch it. But I took it. I thought—it sounds so naive—I thought I could make my chops on it.”
“The gangbangers call that getting jumped in,” I said. “They beat the crap out of you and if you survive, they let you join their set.”
She laughed softly, bitterly. “I didn’t survive.”
“That’s the point,” I said. “If everyone survived, what kind of initiation would it be?”
“I’ll be disbarred.”
I didn’t say anything to that, but what went through my mind again was my father’s favorite old saw, “You make your bed, you lie in it.” What I said was, “If it’s such a big case, why wouldn’t anyone else touch it?”
“Because of Baron. He had too much involvement, too much interference.”
“Too much ego,” I said.
“Definitely,” she said. “I saw the pitfalls, but there was merit.”
“And there was media.”
“Yes, there was media.” She had the grace to blush. To busy her hands she picked up a bag of Doritos Guido had left on the sofa, took out a few chips, fiddled with them.
Eyes fixed in space, she said, “We didn’t expect a vigorous challenge. We weren’t ready for it. We weren’t ready for you.”
“You didn’t do your homework, Jennifer,” I said. “Or you would have been smarter about the target you picked. You can take cheap shots at the police department all day and the public will roll for you. Bad cops make good press because everyone likes to hate the police right now. I would have stayed out of it and clucked my tongue like every other politically correct asshole in town. But you made your big mistake when you named the cops, and got it wrong.”
“We didn’t get it wrong.”
I said, “Oh?”
“I may have fucked up trying to hold it all together, but I stand by the allegations against Flint and Kelsey. They coerced their witnesses to lie.”
I stayed calm. It took effort, but I stayed mellow. I knew she was a lawyer and had a lawyer’s skew on facts and implications. Then I took some of my own old advice and did some silent counting. When I passed ten the second time, I got up and stretched. The telephone had rung twice more. No Mike.
“So, Jennifer,” I said, “can I get you something else to drink? Something a little stronger than root beer? Guido already has a stash around somewhere.”
“If you are.”
There was half a bottle of chardonnay in the refrigerator. I found two more-or-less clean glasses and poured. I let her get some of it down before I said, “Charles Conklin is quite a guy.” She responded with a shudder.
“Spent much time with him?”
“He’s a client,” she said. “I can’t discuss him.”
“I understand,” I said. I sipped my drink, walked around the room a little. “I don’t know anything abou
t you. Are you married? Do you have children?”
“Divorced. One child. He’s three. How about you? You work so late. Do you have children at home?”
“Two teenagers. One’s mine, one’s my lover’s. Great kids. I love them to death.” I smiled, a phony-feeling smile. “Kids are hard work, so difficult to do the right things. You want to protect them. You want them to be independent. They should know about the real world, but you don’t want to scare them about people.”
“It is hard.”
“I know one thing. I wouldn’t want a man with Charles Conklin’s record moving in next door.” I tipped my glass to her stony face, gave her a phony, us-pals laugh. “Did you hear about his career plans when he gets out? Burgess says he wants to work with children. Like a coyote works in the hen house. If I were you, I wouldn’t take your baby to the victory party, Jennifer.”
She followed with a non sequitur. “I didn’t suborn Jerry Kelsey.”
“What did you do?”
“Whatever was necessary to keep him in town—he’s a material witness. I delivered some groceries, ran some errands on his behalf, made sure no one harassed him. Especially the police.”
“Who dopes his scotch?”
She drew back. Either she was a better actress than I had thought, or she was a better lawyer; same thing. From her reaction, she didn’t know what I was talking about.
“Jerry’s scotch is laced with barbiturates,” I said. “He must have been taking downers for a long time because he has built up a powerful tolerance to them. That day Guido and I went to his house? Guido drank two scotches and slept for two days. My question is, does Jerry dope his own, or is it delivered to him that way? I know he wasn’t in the kitchen long enough to dissolve a big dose into our drinks. He was serving premix.”
She deflated. “I can’t talk to you.”
“Yes you can.” I sat down close beside her. “That’s why you came here, Jennifer, to talk to me. You looked up out of your gloom and you saw me hanging on the cross over your head and you knew I could save you. As Jesus told his transgressors, the first one among you who confesses her sins gets the big lollipop, the rest of you get the stick.”
“You’re mixing metaphors,” she groaned. “And you can’t make me say, ‘Let’s stick it to them.’”
“But that’s the idea, isn’t it? You want to defect. You want to snitch off the others and come out a hero.”
“I want to salvage my career.”
“I’ll do what I can, but I have a price.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“I want copies of the witness affidavits. I want you to be straight with me.”
Every time the telephone rang, it made me jumpier. I listened through the beep, impatient for the caller to begin speaking. I could only half concentrate on anything else until I knew who was on the other end. The call was another hang-up.
Jennifer said, “It would be unethical for me to release confidential documents.”
The phone rang again. The machine clicked and beeped, and then I heard singing, a familiar slightly off-key baritone. “Maggie, M-M-M-Maggie, you’re the only g-g-g-girl that I adore.”
I picked it up, pathetically relieved. “Hi, big guy. What’s happening?”
“Nothin’.” Mike drew out the word. “Wanted you to know you’re the most wonderful woman in the world. I miss you. I really, really miss you.”
“Sounds like you’ve been partying. Where are you?”
“We all came up to the Shortstop to watch the news. Had a coupla beers. Did I tell you you’re the most wonderful woman I ever knew?”
“Close enough.” It was like talking to a dopey child. He was bombed. He had been drinking beer at the new house, so he had probably been relaxed when he got to the bar around four. It was now almost ten and he was relaxed to the point of sloppiness. I asked, “Are you still at the Shortstop?”
“Oh, sure. Bunch of the old guys came by, so we watched you again. Not you, but you know what I mean. Maggie, you’re…” Words seemed to fail him so he started humming.
“Is anyone there sober?” I asked.
“I’m sober,” he said, a small attempt to be huffy about the insinuation.
“More sober than you?”
“No. I’m the designated driver.”
“Great. Stay put. I’ll be there to get you as soon as I can.”
“I’ll be waiting,” he sang. “I’ll wait for you until the sun comes up if I have to. I’ll wait until hell freezes over. Maggie?”
“Yes, baby.”
“I love you, Maggie.” He seemed a little weepy.
“I love you too, baby. Just don’t go near anything with fast moving parts until I get there.”
“I would never look at another woman.”
It took a few attempts to make him say good-bye. When I hung up, I was in a hurry.
“Jennifer,” I said, “this has been fun. But I gotta go.”
“May I wait here?” she asked. “It’s so peaceful.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I wouldn’t feel comfortable.”
“I understand. I shouldn’t have asked.”
She gathered her things and waited while I wrote a note for Guido and turned out lights. As I locked the door, as a precaution in case she had ideas about spontaneous re-entry, I said, “My associate will be back in a few minutes.”
“Was that him on the phone?”
“No. That was my lover. You know my lover, don’t you?”
She seemed to search through her memory banks before committing herself. She said, “Do I?”
“Maybe not. When can I see the affidavits?”
“I’ll slip into my office now and run you copies.”
“You know the only way to save yourself is to join the winning camp.”
“I know,” she sighed.
“Have a messenger deliver the papers here, tonight. The guard up front will take care of them until I get back. Right now, I need to fetch Mike home.”
“Mike?” she said.
“My lover,” I said, and shot the bolt. I didn’t give her the rest. She should have known.
Chapter 24
The Shortstop is a bar out on Sunset Boulevard in Echo Park, just below Dodger Stadium. The owners aimed for a baseball motif, but because the police academy sits at the edge of the stadium parking lot, it is the off-duty cop crowd that has given the place its character and rowdy reputation.
There was a big crowd spilling out onto Sunset, about half of them women in short Spandex or tight jeans. Wherever there are police, there are women looking for them. Mike says the uniform is the turn-on. I say it’s availability.
The closest parking place was two blocks away. It was a crappy neighborhood by day, scary as hell by night, with or without police nearby. I locked my bag in the trunk and slipped my keys into my jeans pocket. I wished, just fleetingly, for the little automatic Mike had forced on me a few nights before. I had to settle for walking with a purpose.
I was propositioned, as a matter of form, by a young hunk who was sitting on the curb heaving into the storm drain. I thanked him for the offer and walked on.
A couple of parked cars rocked to the rhythm of backseat love, and one pair of outdoorsy lovers were going at it in the recessed doorway of a closed dry-cleaning shop. They were doing a lot of heavy-duty verbalizing that bespoke the man’s failure to give the situation a firm approach. I thought he was compensating with some creative alternatives to the old in and out, but she did not seem impressed.
The bar was smoky and dark and vibrated with a country plaint from the jukebox. I couldn’t find Mike at first. A few bobbers and weavers standing at the bar inside the door made perfunctory come-ons. I wondered if they were the appointed greeters or just the outgoing type. When I asked for Mike, I got nowhere with them.
The bartender was a big man who kept a sharp eye on things, a retired cop. I had heard that police brass and city fathers had come down hard on him a few times after noisy brawls made the
Metro page in the Times. He worked hard to overcome the bar’s bad reputation. All over the paneled walls he had hung signed, framed glossies of substantial types from Tommy LaSorda to former police chief Daryl Gates.
The bartender asked if I wanted a drink and when I told him I only wanted to find Mike Flint, he made himself scarce.
I went through to the first room, small tables and a few chairs, a lot of standing room and all of it filled—men and women in about equal numbers. The smell of liquor, perfume, people in close quarters on a hot night, could have been bottled and sold under the label “Lookin’ for Love.”
I was looking for Mike. And I hadn’t found him.
There was a second room in the back, on the far side of the bank of lockers the management gave to women customers for their purses. I had to wedge my way through the passageway, dodging hands that grabbed my rear, smiling off lines that represented damn good effort and years of practice. I appreciated the effort. I appreciated the attention. But all I wanted to do was find Mike and get the hell out.
The back room was as full as the first, noisier and smokier because it was smaller. There was a pool table in the middle of the room, but there wasn’t enough available space for anyone to play. I recognized Mike’s group off in the far corner by their grubby work clothes, and began making my way back toward them.
Finally, I saw Mike. He was sitting on the banquette at the far side, talking with a cluster of maybe half a dozen of the guys. I knew that he had been drinking, knew that drink explained why he found all the jokes so funny. Drink probably also explained the sweet young thing sitting on his lap.
Mike has a soft spot for chicanas, especially chicanas in short, flippy skirts. He says they have an assertive way about them that he likes. The one on his lap was being assertive about nuzzling my favorite soft spot on his neck. His focus, blurred as it was, seemed to be the guy gang and he was holding her as a matter of form, to keep her from falling onto the floor. Holding her like a habit.
Once again, I wished for the automatic he had locked away in the closet.
I heard my name pass through the crowd, and then I lost sight of Mike because everyone stood up and faced me. I was grabbed from behind and boosted up onto the pool table. I was confused at first, thinking these were ridiculous lengths to go to protect a brother officer from being caught dirty. When I had regained my balance and was standing on the table, I saw Mike’s face beaming up at me as he joined the others in applause. The little dear was still clinging to him, more like a fungus than a friend.
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