Bad Intent

by Wendy Hornsby

“Why, Miss Scarlett,” he said, leaning out his window for kissing, “aren’t you pretty?”

  “Yes, I am,” I said. He wore slacks, a sportshirt, and a secretive grin. I touched his arm. “You’re mighty pretty your own damn self.”

  “Climb in,” he said. “We have reservations at the most exclusive eatery in town.”

  “Do you need a tie? Do I need heels?”

  “No, and no. Just climb in.”

  I had to brush dog hair off my seat. “We should go check on Bowser.”

  “We’ll do that right now; it’s on the way. Don’t worry about Bowser, though. He’s fine. So fine, he doesn’t want to leave his new yard for anything.”

  Mike drove us east to the Pasadena Freeway, then dropped down into South Pasadena.

  “Is this restaurant a new discovery?” I asked.

  “Old place, new discovery.”

  He pulled up in front of the house and parked beside the dumpster. The yard was still cluttered with building materials, but the trash—the old carpets and drapes, mostly—had been cleared away. No beer cans, no men.

  Looking up at the front I had a sudden sort of electric jolt as I realized, truly realized for the first time, that this was our house. Me, Mike, Casey, and Michael. And Bowser. Not playing house, not shuffling back and forth between my house and his house, but living together in this place for two and a half years. Mingled furniture. Mingled destinies. Suddenly it scared me. Suddenly it looked like commitment. Might as well have been a ring on my finger.

  I hung back while Mike unlocked the door, then I followed him inside, staying a few steps behind, making a little space between us.

  The only light came from the tall back windows. Twilight, filtered through the leaves of the old avocado tree by the patio, painted the walls and the floor with delicate blue lace that moved with the breeze. I stepped into the shadow pattern, like wearing a veil as I crossed the room.

  Bowser pressed his nose to the glass, tongue hanging out, tail wagging, happy to see us. I opened the door for him. “What time is our reservation?” I asked.

  “About now,” Mike said. I couldn’t see his face in the failing light.

  “Let me say hi to Bowse,” I said, “then we can go. How far is it?”

  “Not far.”

  Someone had given Bowser a new tennis ball. He dropped it on my foot. Mike went back inside as I stepped out onto the patio to throw the ball for the dog to fetch a couple of times while I checked his new water dish, poured some fresh kibble into his new bowl. He was more interested in having his head scratched and his stomach rubbed than in eating. He kept looking into the house behind me, and I knew he was searching for Casey.

  “Casey’ll be home tomorrow, old man,” I said. He sighed and lay down and looked up at me with pathetic big eyes.

  Mike came out through the dining room doors. I saw the flicker of candlelight behind him, heard Wynton Marsalis’s trumpet, “Taking a Chance on Love,” with his father Ellis accompanying him on piano, as soft and lacy as the shadows. Mike held his hand out to me. “Time to eat.”

  Out of nowhere, I started crying.

  “Don’t worry,” he said, coming to me, gathering me against his crisp shirtfront. “I didn’t cook the dinner. You’ll be okay.”

  “It’s not the food that worries me.” I wiped my eyes and walked in with him.

  Mike had made a small table out of two sawhorses and a couple of planks, and covered them with a starched white cloth, filled an empty juice jar with roses from the backyard and set it in the middle. There were two places set, and two folding chairs. The only light came from the candelabra on a ladder beside the table. The music came from a CD player on the bare floor.

  Mike pulled out my chair with an elaborate flourish. “Madame,” he said, and kissed the back of my neck when I sat down.

  Before he could go away, I pulled him down to me by the hand, brought his face to mine. “Everything is beautiful,” I said. I still had a lump in my throat and a vague sense of foreboding.

  “You only think so because it’s dark in here. Couple more days, though, and it will be beautiful.”

  “I wasn’t referring to the house.” I raised his hand to kiss the backs of his fingers.

  “If you don’t stop now, the food will get cold.”

  “Better call the waiter, then.” I let him go, but he lingered long enough to curl my toes before he went to fetch the caterer-wrapped meal from the kitchen.

  Salad, pasta something, chocolate mousse, and fresh raspberries. It looked nice, but I could hardly swallow anything except the dry champagne. I couldn’t take my eyes off Mike across the table from me. The thing is, I was trying to imagine growing old with that face beside me, across from me, all around me all the time. It is a world-class face, so I must be a hard sell. I was very unsettled.

  Mike’s plate had hardly been touched, either. Marsalis, pere et fils, were playing “The Very Thought of You.”

  Mike watched me, without saying anything, as I picked up my glass of champagne and walked with it over to his side of the table. He leaned back in his chair and looked up at me, questions in his expression. When he held out his arms to me, inviting me onto his lap, I shook my head.

  “Dance with me,” I said. As he led me around the freshly sanded floor, I kissed him, beginning at the point of his chin and working along his wonderful, craggy face all the way to his ear. When I got there, I whispered, “I love you, Mike.”

  He responded by nuzzling my neck. I had chills that had nothing to do with the breeze coming through the open windows. From somewhere, while we danced, he pulled out a small gold box and offered it to me on his upturned palm. My stomach did a roller-coaster fall; I was grateful I had foregone the pasta. I lost the music and stepped on his foot.

  “What is that?” I asked. I didn’t really want to know, and I did not touch the box on his hand.

  “Open it,” he said, smiling like a kid at a birthday party, embarrassed when the birthday girl got to his gift, but excited, too.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t trust small boxes.”

  “Open it. Trust me.”

  Well, I trust Mike, so I did it, I opened the box. Inside, under the cotton, I saw a flash of gold in the candlelight and nearly chickened out. When I finally pulled away the cotton, I found a shiny new key attached to a gold heart by a heavy chain. The heart was engraved with an M and had a clear stone set on either side of it. It was pretty. I think I was relieved it wasn’t a ring, but I can’t be sure.

  “Whose M is it?” I asked, holding it up, spinning the heart in the flickering light. “My initial, or yours?”

  “It’s ours. This is the key to the front door of our house.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What did you think was in the box?”

  “I hadn’t a clue.”

  “You were nervous about it.” He said this with tooth-sucking, teasing sureness.

  I said, “Are you going to dance with me or are you going to try to pick a fight?”

  “Of course, there are a lot of M words. I guess it could stand for a lot of things. Want me to list a few?”

  “No.”

  “I want to talk about M words.” He took me in his arms again and danced me across the room and out onto the brick patio. His voice was next to my ear. “There’s, mar…” He drew it out sadistically. “…igolds. And, marbles. Don’t forget Margot—a funny name to give a little baby.”

  “The only thing funny here is you, big guy.”

  “Ready to dip?” He dropped me backward, pulled me up again, finished with a spin that brought us face to face. With our noses almost touching, he said, “Margot Eugenie Duchamps MacGowen?”

  “What?”

  “Marry me.”

  Chapter 26

  Fire lit the sky for miles. Like a giant pointer, a fat white plume reached up out of its center and disappeared into the cloud cover. Six helicopters circled the area, shining their big spots down into the middle of the red glow, s
aying, “Here it is.” We could see exactly where the fire was. The problem was getting to it.

  The freeways for miles on all sides were nearly impassable, the surface streets were at gridlock. We were near Overland Avenue, somewhere on the Westside, trying to find a way through. Mike blasted his horn in frustration before he gave up and veered off to drive the shoulder. He bounced us through potholes, over road debris and various car parts. It was uncomfortable, scary as hell, but we did progress past the solid, unmoving mass of cars.

  “You weren’t friends?” I asked, holding on to the dash.

  Mike frowned as if he’d swallowed something distasteful. “No. He’s a one-way kind of guy. I don’t think he has any friends. Something about him, the things he talks about, I guess—I don’t know. I worked a tough case with him, but I kept my distance.”

  “What kind of things?”

  “Schemes.” He nearly sideswiped a station wagon to avoid a crater. When the Blazer stopped bouncing, he took a breath. “Always involved in some sort of deal, gonna get rich, gonna blow town. Nothing ever seemed to pan out, though. And he was a lush.”

  I was trying to relax; the worst thing you can do in a collision is brace yourself—snaps your bones. I asked, “Was he competent on the job?”

  “Maybe he was once, or he wouldn’t have been promoted. He knew what to do, but he’d get drunk, lose track of things. I was new to the division and he sort of attached himself to me. Probably because no one else would work with him.”

  “I read the Conklin investigation files. I didn’t see his name on much of it.”

  “Totally H.U.A. all the time.”

  I said, “I forgot my glossary.”

  He risked taking his eyes off the road long enough to give me his tough-guy smirk. “Head Up Ass.”

  I said, “Oh.”

  “It was a piece-of-shit case to begin with. The trail was a year old. Jerry asks to be assigned to do the year review, the lieutenant doesn’t trust him, but he has to give him something to keep him busy. So the lieutenant says, sure, take it on, and here’s the new kid on the block—me—to be your bun boy. I knew Jerry didn’t expect a damn thing from me. For damn sure he never thought I would pull it together.”

  There was open space in the middle of the next intersection. Mike, holding down the horn, blasted through it to effect a left turn. We took a lot of the evil eye and not a few middle-finger salutes, but we made it.

  When we were back on the shoulder, I said, “There is a body?”

  “Yes.”

  I picked up the telephone. “What’s Michael’s number?”

  “Why?”

  “I have to talk to him.”

  “He’s okay, Maggie. Calm down. Michael and his mom went up to her folks’ place in Arrowhead.”

  “How do you know?” I asked.

  “I already called.”

  Mike rode the center line down Rose Avenue, crossed Sepulveda in the no-man’s land between the end of a red light and the flashing on of a green. Fire trucks, police cars, paramedics vehicles, and news vans blocked the street, and we were still two blocks from the equipment storage yard where Jerry Kelsey kept his trailer. Where flames still shot ten feet into the air.

  By a combination of skill and dumb luck, Mike got in among the official vehicles without major damage and found a place to stop.

  I was out of the Blazer and running toward the storage lot, ankle-deep in dirty run-off water, a fine spray falling from overhead, when Ralph Faust grabbed me, spun me around.

  “Hold on, Maggie,” he said. His grip hurt my wrist.

  I said, “Let go.”

  Through the fence I could see flaming oil barrels and construction equipment, the hole in the ground where the gasoline storage tank had been. Jerry Kelsey’s trailer was nothing more than a molten mass, a black smear on the gravel.

  I smelled booze on Ralph’s breath. He might have smelled wine on mine. Mike had been beeped at the beginning of our second bottle of champagne. In the middle of the argument.

  “We did this, you know,” Ralph said. “We started it.”

  “What do I hear?” I asked, cruel sarcasm in there. “Sudden compunction? You never turned around before, saw the human wreckage in your wake?”

  “Don’t be mad at me.”

  “Have to be mad at somebody.” I was looking around for Mike. Finally, I spotted him talking to the coroner’s people. I pulled against Ralph’s grip, but he held firm, drew me against him. I heard heavy sighing in his chest.

  I looked up into his face. I whispered, “It’s only a fire. You’ll be all right. Let me go.”

  But he seemed unable to comprehend.

  “Was Kelsey in there?” I asked.

  From his pocket he took a shoe, a little navy pump, about a size five or six. The toe was blackened, the leather was wet. I took the shoe from him. Casey hadn’t worn anything that small since she was in about the fourth grade; the thought a reflex. My daughter is always my first thought when something scary happens.

  “Where did you get this?” I asked him.

  “I was standing over there by the gate with a film crew, and it just floated by.” He pointed with his free hand. “Just floated by.”

  I broke then and ran to Mike. He caught me, too, but more to hold me away than to keep me. I offered the little shoe to him. I said, “Where is Jennifer Miller?”

  Mike looked over at the technician leaning against the coroner’s empty van. “One body?”

  “So far,” was her response.

  “Male or female?”

  “Don’t know,” the woman said. “Firemen saw it inside the trailer, but it’s still too hot to get a better look. No hurry. Victim isn’t going anywhere—charred beyond, from the description. Just hope there’s enough left to x-ray. Have to wait.”

  Mike took me aside, walked me back toward his car. “Did you hear her? You have to wait. I need to talk to some people. Can I trust you to stay put for a while?”

  I dropped back. “Did you say stay put?”

  He sighed. “Just don’t get hurt, okay?”

  “I’ll try.”

  “Jeez,” he muttered, and jogged off toward the police command post.

  Staying on the perimeter, away from the firehoses, I walked back to the news vans, found the one sent out by the network I had been working with. Jack Riley was inside the cab, talking on the phone, watching the fire in air-conditioned comfort. He climbed out when he saw me.

  “When did you get here?” I asked.

  He shrugged, “Five, ten minutes ago. Lot of fuss isn’t it? I just don’t get the big deal about a fire. I mean, it’s nice and bright—good color—but they’re doing prime-time interrupts for some bulldozers and a watchman? Probably started it himself smoking in bed, or tossed a butt in the wrong place. The petro people are going to dump their load on the oil barrels in a minute, then it will be all over.”

  “Jack, don’t you know who the watchman is?”

  He toned right down, opened up, ready to rethink things. “Should I know?”

  “Jerry Kelsey. One of the detectives in the Conklin case.”

  “Oh.” With some enthusiasm. “He’s the corpse?”

  “Don’t know. Adds a little fuel to the story, though, doesn’t it?”

  “I’ll forgive the ghoulish attempt at humor.” Jack was thinking fast, as usual, putting something together. “You’ve got a handle on the deep background, don’t you? I mean, you knew this guy.”

  “I met him. I used a picture that I took right there in front of his trailer in the piece that ran last night.”

  “Now we have a story I like. I want you on camera, Maggie.” His new enthusiasm moved us toward the film crew across the street. They were just standing around, gossiping with the weekend news talent.

  “What do you want me to do?” I asked him.

  “Give me a break.” He gave me a shoulder nudge. “You know what to do. Let’s just do it before we lose the fire.”

  Jack had a short ver
bal scuffle with the talent, who was getting one of his first shots at a prime-time story out of the fire. He was young and smooth-looking, and eager. He suggested that instead of turning everything over to me, he interview me, though he hadn’t a clue what questions to ask. It was his turn, dammit, and he wasn’t going to give it up.

  “He’s right, Jack,” I said. “You’re screwing with his resume. This is his fire to report, and I’m an interloper. What if he introduces me, nods his head here and there, and closes? We’d all be happy, right?”

  That’s the way we did it. The two of us stood in tight, with the camera three yards in front of us, the fire about sixty yards behind us. Even at that distance, I could feel some of its heat. The entire scene was lit red.

  After the intro—he did a good job, said everything I told him to—I gave a brief rundown on Jerry Kelsey, retired cop, and why he lived in the trailer, how I met him in relation to the Conklin case. I was careful to mention Marovich, twice, getting in a dig about his tight race for reelection.

  Then I laid what I hoped was the bombshell, peppering it shamelessly with attention-getting buzzwords: “Twice this week, fatal tragedy has struck among those originally involved in the Conklin murder conviction.

  “During the early hours of Tuesday morning, young Hanna Rhodes, a witness to the slaying, was cold-bloodedly gunned down in the Southeast Los Angeles neighborhood where she grew up. Locked out of the school yard where she had once played, Hanna Rhodes was felled by two blasts to the chest.” Melodramatic, sure. But the entire scene seemed to call for Grand Guignol.

  “Fourteen years ago,” I continued, “it was Hanna Rhodes’s eyewitness testimony that sent Charles Conklin to prison for life. The senior detective assigned to the case, the detective who first heard her account, was Jerry Kelsey.

  “Behind us, you see the inferno that has consumed the modest trailer home of Detective Jerry Kelsey. The coroner informs us that firefighters have found an as-yet unidentified corpse among the ashes of Detective Kelsey’s trailer. It is still too hot for them to go in for a closer look, to attempt to identify the deceased.

  “On Monday afternoon, a court hearing is scheduled on behalf of Charles Conklin to evaluate the testimony of Hanna Rhodes, to scrutinize the procedures used by Jerry Kelsey to elicit that testimony nearly a decade and a half ago. In light of the double tragedies, how much crucial testimony has been quieted? Quieted forever.”