Bad Intent

by Wendy Hornsby

  “That’s it?” he said, fiddling with the buttons.

  “We’ll work on the fine points later.” I caught up with Etta.

  Outside the Rhodes apartment there were a few guests sitting on folding chairs, holding paper plates heaped with food. They nodded to us, made low remarks to Etta that I didn’t catch and she ignored.

  The living room held maybe fifteen more people, about half that number again in the kitchen and dining alcove. Etta parted the crowd and led us through.

  “Miz Rhodes,” she said in mournful tones. “Look who’s come to pay respects.”

  Mrs. Rhodes was a small, attractive woman wearing a simple black dress. She looked young to be mourning a granddaughter.

  I started to say something like how sorry I was for her loss when she set upon Mike.

  “Why, officer,” she said, her voice rising in pitch at the end. “You was such a nice lookin’ young man. How’d you get so old?”

  “Hello, Mrs. Rhodes.” Mike combed his fingers through his white hair. “It’s been a while, hasn’t it?”

  “Not that long. What happened to you?”

  He blushed. “Guess it’s my line of work.”

  There was general polite laughter. Mike shook a few hands that were offered, exchanged greetings with old acquaintances, let himself be led to the buffet table.

  Mrs. Rhodes took me aside. “Etta says you were asking about my Hanna. What was it you wanted to know?”

  “About what she saw the night Officer Wyatt was shot.”

  “Lot of people been asking me about that. Hanna was living with her mama back then, so I don’t know anything about it except what people talked about later. I don’t think you can trust in the truth of a story once it gets told over and over so many times. Do you?”

  “Not usually,” I said. “Who has been asking you about Hanna?”

  “Well, the police, of course. Someone came, said she was with the district attorney. Little tiny girl. I couldn’t figure her as a district attorney.”

  “Was it Jennifer Miller?” I asked.

  “Something like that. There was someone else from the district attorney, wanted to look through Hanna’s room, but Hanna didn’t have a room here. Then the other officer—not Officer Flint—he came by, too. What’s his name? I’m not thinking very clearly today.”

  “Officer Kelsey?”

  “Could be.” She nodded. “And some people came, said they were from the newspapers or the TV. Etta says you’re from the TV.”

  “In a way. I know it’s a bad time to ask you for anything. But Hanna is one of the subjects in the film I’m working on. If you have any pictures of her, I’d like very much to see them. Maybe old school pictures, something more recent.”

  “Mm hmm.” She puffed out her bottom lip, furrowed her brow and studied me. “Why?”

  “I want Hanna to be more than a corpse on someone’s front steps. She was someone’s little girl once. I want people to know that.”

  Mrs. Rhodes nodded while I spoke. “I lost all I had in a fire some years ago; that’s when I moved out to California to be near my daughter. But maybe there is something. Hanna left a little box of things with me when she went to prison. I don’t know what’s in it; private things, you know. I was going to look at it later, but you might as well see, too. It’s in the closet in the other room.”

  I walked with her down a short inner hallway to her immaculate bedroom. The double-size bed was covered with handbags and hats, a few wraps—just like parties at my parents’ house.

  Mrs. Rhodes reached up to the shelf of her small wardrobe and took down a carton that was about a foot square. She cleared a space on the bed so we could sit with the carton between us.

  “When Hanna’s mama died, Hanna started using my address, but she never really lived here except for a day or two off and on.” She pulled off the brittle old masking tape that sealed the carton and pried up the flaps. “I had rules, you see, about the way a young lady should behave in my home. Hanna preferred the streets to my rules.”

  Mrs. Rhodes lifted out a folded Girl Scout scarf and a few faded construction paper folders that looked like school projects. There was a blonde Barbie doll with matted hair and a few of her outfits, all of them frayed with use. And mementos: a pencil from Disneyland, some seashells, several movie ticket stubs, a candy cane reindeer with pipe-cleaner antlers, a matchbook from a Sizzler, a ceramic box with “Be My Valentine” painted on the chipped lid.

  Mrs. Rhodes said, “When something special happens to a young girl, she likes to keep a souvenir of it.”

  I found the small store of treasures to be very sad. Was this as special as it ever got for Hanna?

  Cheap costume jewelry filled a coffee can. While Mrs. Rhodes sorted through what looked like report cards, I went through the coffee can. Plastic baubles, adjustable rings with colored glass jewels, dangly earrings all tangled together. I pulled them out in a mass, dragging out with them a long bead-chain, and started to separate them to keep my hands busy.

  “Here are some school pictures.” Mrs. Rhodes laid out a handful of wallet-size portraits. “Hanna must have traded with her friends; I don’t know who most of these children are. This one’s Hanna. I would say maybe third or fourth grade.”

  Hanna had a long, heart-shaped face, still a few front teeth missing in her cocky smile. Her hair was done in an asymmetrical Afro. I said, “Very cute.”

  “Yes, she was.” Mrs. Rhodes had no tears. “She was a pretty little child. Not an exceptional child in any way, except to her mother and me. But she was pretty. Wild and pretty.”

  “May I borrow the picture?”

  “If you like.”

  “And this?” I held up the disentangled bead-chain. There were five spent .38 shells, pierced and hanging on the chain like charms. The shells were stained with brown, as if rolled or dropped in a pan of paint. I could see fragments of fingerprints.

  Mrs. Rhodes fingered the shells. “What is that?”

  “A little souvenir, I think. Something special did happen to Hanna.”

  Chapter 29

  “I had it all wrong,” I said. While Mike put away the camera in the back of the car, I held the brownie he had carried away from Mrs. Rhodes’s buffet table. “I listen to your rowdy stories and I have to remind myself they’re ninety-two percent pure bull. Now and then I forget to do the math, so I get suckered right into believing them as told.”

  “What are you talking about?” He took back his brownie. “You saying I’m a liar?”

  “Yes. And I’m saying I’m deeply chagrined for entertaining for even a moment any notion that you might have abused LaShonda and Hanna. I walked you into that house wishing we had stopped to get your body armor, because the way you talk about what you used to do in the good old days—kicking butt and taking names later—I’m thinking it might get real ugly when these people set eyes upon you. But it was like a neighborhood reunion in there, Sugar.”

  “You should have been chagrined, Miss Berkeley-has-a-big-dictionary. Hell, I know all their kids. Arrested most of them. We’re family.”

  “Exactly my point.” I jabbed him with a finger. “Maybe you arrested eight percent of their kids. For jaywalking or something. The rest? Ninety-two percent pure bull. Some tough guy you are, Flint. You swagger in and swap brownie recipes.”

  He laughed and I got a chocolatey peck on the lips before he unlocked my car door for me and opened it. As I climbed in, the string of bullet shells dangling from my neck tinkled like a wind chime. I pulled up the chain and looked at the shells again, being careful not to touch any of the brown stain I was certain would prove to be the blood of Wyatt Johnson.

  “You know you can’t keep those,” Mike said, closing his door behind him.

  I know.” I let the chain fall back against my chest. LaShonda had run right away in a panic, but Hanna had stayed behind, and not hidden in some old car, either. Not until later. It took a fairly cool head to scramble over and around the bleeding, dying body
of Wyatt Johnson to collect her souvenirs—like collecting seashells.

  The coroner thought it had taken Wyatt Johnson a minute or two to expire; long enough to pump out a lot of blood. Had Wyatt spoken to Hanna? Had he explained how powerful those spent shells could be—a ticket to the gas chamber if they could be tied to the shooter’s firearm? She was street-wise. Had she figured the angle all by herself? The big question on my mind was, who had she told? Who had known she had to be silenced?

  “You’re quiet,” Mike said.

  I was wrong about something else.”

  “Two admissions in one day? Unbelievable. Did you and Mrs. Rhodes smoke something funny in that back bedroom?”

  “I had persuaded myself that there had to be a second person in the restroom with Wyatt Johnson.”

  “There was.” He chewed the last of his brownie. “You’ve got the proof of that hanging around your neck. Hanna went in there.”

  “Before that. Bart Conklin told me how his brother used to hang around waiting for someone to commit a robbery, then he’d go in and rob the robber. Because of the missing shells and the way the body was lying, I thought someone must have been in the restroom with Wyatt. I thought maybe Conklin had interrupted Wyatt making a deal with someone, and ripped them off. Or tried to. And that the girls didn’t see the third man because they ran off. But Hanna would have seen him. Nosy little thing, she hung around.”

  “I keep telling you, Wyatt was just taking a leak. It’s that simple.” Crumbs in his mustache eroded his air of authority. “Trust me, this is how it went down: Conklin sees Wyatt drive up in a nice car, and because he’s an asshole, he wants it. He follows Wyatt into the can, tries to hold him up. It goes wrong, Wyatt gets shot, Conklin runs the hell away. Period. He didn’t even know he’d killed a cop until he heard it on the street later.”

  I must not have looked like a buyer. Mike sighed heavily as he turned from me to start the car. “I know you want something bigger, Maggie. But that’s all it was. Just a crappy heist that went wrong.”

  I said, “But,” before I accepted the futility of arguing a point I was not clear on.

  Mike turned onto Ninety-second Street. “Now that you’ve seen the new color on the walls, how do you like it?”

  I said, “I wanted Kelsey to be there somehow.”

  “That night? No way. You want a big drug deal, or some undercover scam, or at the very least a loose woman. But you can’t make it, baby. Not with Wyatt. Not with Kelsey, either.”

  “Kelsey looks guilty. There’s more to his involvement.”

  He laughed. “If looks could convict us, we’d all be in the slam. The only thing Kelsey was guilty of back then was drinking on the job. And another thing: You’re never going to know any more about what happened that night than you do right now. So, I want you to think about Wyatt’s family for a minute. Is it nice to go around suggesting things you can’t substantiate? It makes them feel bad, and what does it do for you?”

  I slouched down in the seat and watched the scenery for a while. Maybe I would have to accept what he said about Wyatt, but Jerry Kelsey was guilty of a whole lot more than drinking on the job. I just didn’t know what. And for sure I was not ready to argue that one with Mike.

  It was Sunday afternoon. Every church we passed leaked music. Family groups in their Sunday finest strolled along the streets. Very festive. But all I could see was LaShonda running off in a panic, and Hanna, braver, more street-wise, going in for a better look. Gathered up the bullet shells as her prize, blackmail currency if she got wise enough. Was she hiding herself in that derelict car, secreting her new treasures, or just taking a nap when James Shabazz called her name?

  I said, “Mike?”

  “Thought you went to sleep.”

  “Hanna’s new affidavit is a fraud.”

  “I know.”

  “Someone didn’t want her to say so.”

  “I know.”

  “That’s why she died.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “What else do you know?” I asked. But he just smiled, a the way to South Pasadena.

  We rejoined the painters at the South Pasadena house. A brother-in-law cum electrician had installed an upgraded electrical service. I spent the better part of an hour with him in my new work space, showing him where I needed outlet strips along the baseboards. I talked him into removing a piece of the hardwood floor so that I could have some recessed outlets in the middle of the big room. Before he got away from me, I also talked him into some strip lighting.

  When I had pushed him as far as I dared, I joined the cadre of painters upstairs and worked on windowframes for a few hours.

  There were people all around me, but I was left to my own thoughts for the most part. These men had been working together for three solid days. They seemed to have run out of chitchat and had moved on to topics that were more quiet, more serious, more personal I was something of an outsider. I didn’t mind and I didn’t want to intrude.

  At around five, Mike made a sandwich run. When he came back, everyone gathered under the avocado tree to eat and rest. When I heard Mike’s summons, I put the lid on my paint can. But I stayed upstairs after the others had gone down.

  Voices from the yard drifted up through the open balcony doors. With their baritone laughter for background music, I pulled out my big bag and sat down with it in the middle of the floor. It took some searching until I found the two documents that had been at the center of my thoughts. I put them side by side on the drop cloth beside me and studied them.

  Both statements were short. Hanna’s first statement had been dictated to Mike, who handwrote it on a printed interview form. I read it through again.

  “Me and LaShonda was back there and we heard the gun, like I say before. We go start to run over where her mama work because we was scared. But we run smack into Pinkie. He was running out of that toilet where he shot the man. Me and LaShonda look at that dead man and we start screaming and then she ran right off. I didn’t know what to do next. I think Pinkie has another gun and he shoot me, too. But he go jump in that old green car of his and he drive off. I go jump into this old Cadillac is parked there and I climb down in the back and cover up in some old rags and things and I stay there until LaShonda and James call my name and say, ‘Get over here.’ “

  I was having a lot of trouble putting aside my partiality for Mike. I had admitted favoritism from the beginning. Even after factoring that in, for me the handwritten, ungrammatical, uncorrected document had far more credibility than the slick, typed, centered, spell-checked page that Jennifer Miller had sent me. If it was legit, then saying that Hanna had changed her mind surely must be taken literally: The language did not come from Rhodes, Hanna, five-time loser, sixth-grade dropout.

  The affidavit began, “I was eleven years of age on November 6, 1979. I have forgotten some of the smaller details of the events which occurred that evening. In sum, however, my memory is very clear.

  “I was at the above-named service station with my friend, LaShonda DeBevis. At approximately twelve-fifteen a.m. we heard shots fired. I estimate that five or six shots were fired. We were very frightened so we began to run, seeking safety. As we came from the rear parking area, we encountered a man in dark clothing leaving the service station restroom where the shooting occurred. I saw his face clearly, but I did not recognize him. I knew I had not seen him before, nor have I seen him since. Charles Conklin was known to me at the time. The man who ran from the men’s room was not Charles Conklin.

  “I identified Charles Conklin only after relentless pressure and threats to do so from Detectives M. Flint and J. Kelsey. They frightened me. When they offered to buy me a new bicycle, I signed their prepared statement.”

  Dated and signed in the Frontera State Prison for Women. The witnesses were Leroy Burgess and George Schwartz.

  I put the papers away and began cleaning my paintbrushes.

  “Maggie?” Mike came in with a wrapped sandwich in his hand. “Jennifer Miller just pi
cked up her son.”

  I exhaled a breath I think I had been holding on to for a couple of days. I didn’t know Jennifer Miller very well, and what I knew of her I didn’t respect very much. The magnitude of relief I felt upon hearing this piece of news caught me off guard. I asked, “Can we talk to her?”

  “Not yet. They took her in for questioning.”

  “Where’s LaShonda?”

  “With Guido,” he said. “She’s okay.”

  He furrowed his brow, made the deep crease that reminded me of his dad. “We miss you downstairs.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, hearing reproach. “I didn’t mean to be antisocial.”

  I took him by the hand and walked down with him. We joined the circle on the lawn, finding a place next to Hector. Mike sat down with his back against the big tree, and I sat with my back against him. The conversation moved from the Dodgers to the department’s teams for the Baker-to-Vegas run, always with references to old stories that formed a sort of code for their jokes and their affection for one another. My only contribution was to laugh now and then. I wasn’t aware how often I was checking my watch until Mike caught my arm.

  “Going somewhere?” he asked.

  “Casey’s plane comes in at nine,” I said.

  He turned my arm to look at the watch face. “It isn’t even seven. Relax. After the sun sets, then you can start worrying.”

  Hector said, “The place is shaping up. When you moving in?”

  “Tuesday, Wednesday.” Mike smiled contentedly as he looked up at the house, the fresh trim paint shining in the sun.

  “We’ll have you all over for a house-warming next weekend,” I said. “Bring your significant others.”

  With a wicked gleam in his eye, Hector said, “I’m bringing my new girl. Her name’s Olga.”

  “By all means bring her,” I said. “I’d like to show her around the kitchen. Show her my new knife sharpener.”

  Mike put his arms around me and knuckled my shoulder. “What should we put back here? One big table or a couple of smaller ones?”