Bad Intent

by Wendy Hornsby

  The floor of the locker room was cluttered with big, blue equipment duffels overflowing with body armor, batons, helmets, riot-size sacks of plastic wrist restraints marked with the owner’s badge number; ready for the riot that wasn’t going to come, this time. I grabbed a handful of rough paper towels, went over to the rank of sinks, pushed aside the baskets of hair dryers, curling irons, gels, mousses, sprays, and wet the towels.

  My only plan had been to spend some time alone while I calmed down. I scraped off the remains of the paraffin that had been used to lift gunshot residue from my left hand for evidence. Then I pressed the damp towels to my face.

  Something happened to me after I saw what I had washed from my face, saw the front of my blue shirt in the stark fluorescent light; pale pink stain, spots of dark brown.

  The detectives kept asking about peripheral details, who, where, how. No one had given me time to think about the actual shooting, to talk about what I saw. It was all over so fast. From memory, I played it back more slowly.

  The bullet exploded Roddy’s throat, destroyed it, shot flesh and blood and bits of bone spraying into the night like many-colored confetti. I had felt his debris, cold, sharp needles on my face, and the sting of gunpowder tattooing my hand, was deafened by the sound, dazzled by the streak of blue-green light.

  I was on the wooden bench between the lockers, sobbing into the crook of my elbow, when I felt arms around me. My head was gently pressed against a firm, uniformed bosom that smelled of perfume.

  “You want to talk about it?” she asked, patting my back. “No,” I gasped.

  “First kill?”

  I nodded, snagging my hair in her badge.

  “It’s rough. I shot a man during my rookie year, left him a paraplegic. It was his fault—brandishing a loaded firearm—I had to stop him. Still…” She kept patting. “Heard you took him clean. Left-handed.”

  I snuffled, used my arm in lieu of handkerchief.

  “You a lefty?”

  I said, “No.” I admit a tinge of something verging on pride had crept in.

  “I brought in your woman passenger,” she said. I straightened up so I could read her badge, D. Rukowski. “Know what we found in her bag?”

  I said, “Besides chewing gum?”

  “Chloroform. She had a Baggie with a saturated wad of cotton. Best guess is, she was supposed to sing you a lullaby so there wouldn’t be a struggle when O’Leary took you out. Wouldn’t work, though, if the bag was in the backseat.”

  “I threw it in back.” I managed to get to my feet, got some new towels to wipe my face. “The way she was fussing with her purse, I thought she had a tape recorder in there. Or a hypodermic. They used drugs once before.”

  Officer Rukowski squared my shoulders, brushed my damp hair from my forehead. “You played it smart, honey. Old Flint’s out there wearing a groove in the floor, pissing and moaning, saying how lucky you were. You tell him luck had nothing to do with it.”

  Mike was going to say a lot more than how lucky I was. A lot more. Just thinking about the barrage to come wore me out. I sagged back down. “I can’t face him.”

  “Sure you can.” She stood and reached for my arm. “Go fix your face.”

  I pulled myself together the best I could, borrowing a comb and some blush from the collection on the counter. Then I unbuttoned a couple of buttons to show a little cleavage—emergency ammo—and walked out.

  “All set?” Mike took my hand, the one that had killed Roddy O’Leary, and folded it in his. He didn’t say another word about it all the way home.

  It was after three when we got home. Michael and Guido were playing chess at the dining room table.

  Guido said, “Maggie?” in a tentative way, rising from his chair.

  “Everything’s under control,” I said, leaning against Mike. Michael came over and kissed my cheek, squeezed my free hand, and made the tears start all over again.

  “I know you feel awful,” Mike said. “You’re going to feel awful for a while. Go ahead and cry.”

  “I never imagined it would feel so bad.”

  Mike took over where Officer Rukowski left off, patted my back. “If it makes you feel any better, you probably saved Jennifer’s life. O’Leary wasn’t about to leave a witness, even if she was in on it.”

  “I know. He was aiming at her when I shot him.”

  Mike said, “Oh?”

  “If I hadn’t been armed, he would have hit us both, her first, then me.” That’s just about the point where anger began to dispel shock. “For what? To protect the election scenario? To add a plum to Roddy’s resume?”

  “To save his butt,” Mike said. “He’d already killed two people and you were closing in on him. Hector ran his DMV and his credit cards.”

  “So?”

  “Last Tuesday he rented a dark-blue four-wheel drive that looked a whole lot like mine. Turned it in early Wednesday.”

  “Ah,” Guido chirped, connection made. “Tuesday night, that flower of the evening said the guy who shot Hanna was driving a car like Mike’s.”

  I looked up at Mike, started to laugh. “Roddy blew it on deep background all over the map. But, damn, the idiot should have known who he was messing with when he tried to set you up, cupcake.”

  “Yeah.” Mike winked at me. “Don’t mess with the big boys.”

  “I wasn’t talking about you.”

  He nudged me, started to laugh, too.

  Michael had the family furrow between his brows. “Dad, you know, this is the first time I ever heard you talk about what you do at work.”

  Mike flushed a furious red. “I’m sorry, son.”

  “Sorry for what? It’s more interesting than I thought. I sort of imagined you drove around giving people tickets. You’re a strange guy. I like it.”

  “Oh, Jeez.”

  “I was thinking of going into teaching, but…”

  “I don’t want to hear it,” Mike said.

  “Teaching, police work,” I said, “they’re pretty much the same thing. People shooting at you all the time.”

  Michael asked, “How do you get into the academy?”

  Chapter 32

  My mother called at nine o’clock on Monday morning—nine o’clock Boston time. She and my father were there on vacation and had seen my name in a wire service item that ran in the local papers, “Filmmaker Slays Attacker.”

  “Should we be hysterical?” she asked.

  “No,” I said. “Whatever you read, it’s a lie.”

  She chuckled. I read that you were a renowned and gifted filmmaker who shot a carjacker.”

  “Thirty-three and one-third percent a lie, anyway. You can decide for yourself which third of that you want to throw out.” She grew serious. “Are you all right, Margot?”

  “Shaken, but untouched.”

  “Your father, feeling nostalgic, wonders, do you need bail money?”

  “Not this time, Mom,” I said. “Just bring me home some lobsters.”

  After speaking with my dad and repeating virtually everything I had said to Mom, I went outside to fetch our morning Times to see whether they had something to say.

  I had made the first page of the Metro section, just a short piece with very few details, not even the names of the victim and my passenger. The paper had gone to bed before there were many details to learn. It would be different later. I would see to it.

  Before word got out, before all her friends heard about it, I had to talk to Casey and explain what had happened the night before.

  There was a period after her father and I separated when Casey was morbidly afraid for me all the time, worried that something would happen that would take me away from her. For two weeks, I had hardly been able to leave the house. After a reasonable time she overcame her fear, but with reservations I had to be careful to respect.

  It was nearly time for her to get up, anyway. I went in and sat on the end of her bed with Bowser and talked it out with her. She was at once dubious, and frightened, and
sympathetic. When we had gotten to the end, she made a half-hearted attempt to feign illness and stay home—the old pattern—but gave it up when she remembered she wanted to ask Mischa whether her friends could come to classes with her on Friday. When she left with Michael, she seemed fine.

  Detective Valenti picked me up at eight and took me in for more questioning. I would have preferred to drive myself, but my car had been impounded as evidence. Valenti’s attitude toward me had softened considerably overnight. I thought someone must have gotten to him, filled him in. And I thought that someone was Hector.

  Mike had been told by his lieutenant to stay away, so in loco amantis, Hector was there. During all of the questioning he worked at his desk no more than six feet away from us.

  Valenti and I made sketches, went over the crime scene photographs, talked about the minutiae. He asked a lot of questions about my “relationship” with Roddy O’Leary that I found irksome. Overall, it wasn’t bad.

  We had our heads together over a city map while I retraced the route I had taken from Parker Center, when I heard a door open and then a familiar voice. I got up and went across the big bullpen, following the voice. Hector followed close behind me.

  A detective in shirt-sleeves was carrying two cups of coffee into a small interrogation room that was tucked into a dogleg in a back comer. He handed one of the cups to Jennifer Miller.

  “Good morning, counselor,” I said, leaning against the door-frame.

  Jennifer wasn’t particularly happy to see me, but she didn’t duck, either. She was wearing one of her perky suits and her hair and makeup were freshly done. That is, she hadn’t spent the night in jail.

  “How are you this morning?” she asked.

  “I haven’t decided.”

  Hector put a gentle hand on my arm and drew me back. “Valenti needs you,” he said, making a lot of eye contact. Trusting Hector, I acceded. On my way out, I said to Jennifer, “Let’s do lunch.”

  “Not today,” she said, sitting with the posture of the victor waiting for his laurel wreath. “Remember? I have a habeas hearing scheduled at two.”

  Before the door closed again, Hector was inside with Jennifer.

  I went back to Valenti with a white rage rising. “What is she doing here?”

  “Same as you,” Valenti said. “She’s your witness.”

  “Only by miscalculation. She tried to get me killed. Why wasn’t she held?”

  He was shaking his head while I ranted, waiting for me to wind down. “I’ll tell it to you as she told it to us. She asked you to pick her up at Parker Center, take her to an address on Hudson Street in the city. When you stopped at the address to let her out, a man approached the car and opened the driver’s side door. You raised a weapon and shot him. Mrs. Miller did not know you were armed, she did not see his weapon. The name of the victim was familiar to her only because she has followed election coverage. Mrs. Miller says she has no memory of ever meeting Roddy O’Leary.”

  He crossed his arms over his chest and leaned back in his chair, as in, end of story.

  I cleared my throat and leaned nearer to him. “A couple of things. Why did she want to go to Hudson Street if she lives in San Pedro? And, what was she going to do with the chloroform in her purse?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think she lured me to a dark area, planned to gas me so I wouldn’t make a fuss when her colleague blew me away.”

  He was shaking his head again. “She didn’t want to go home to an empty house, so she directed you to her parents’ place. And, there’s nothing illegal about carrying chloroform in that quantity—bug collectors do it all the time. She says her son has a sick hamster. She was going to euthanize it.”

  “You checked this out?”

  “Mom and Dad have her graduation picture on the piano. The kid has a hamster, but whether it’s sick or not…” He shrugged. “And another thing. She says you had previously mentioned to her that an employee of the victim, election staffer named George Schwartz, had been stalking you. She said you had taken pictures of him on several occasions to document the fact. She said you even had him arrested once.”

  Jennifer was good. Her vulnerability crap just kept sucking me right in.

  Valenti was studying me with a devilish light in his eyes, a crooked smile growing from the tough-cop sneer. “How long you known Flint?”

  “A while.”

  “I worked a couple cases with him here and there. He’s a good guy. Great sense of humor.”

  I didn’t say anything. Everyone has a Mike story, it was Valenti’s turn to tell one. They’re funny stories, but I wasn’t in the mood to be jollied.

  Valenti was grinning wide now. “Outside of me, he’s probably the best detective in the city. You know why? Because he can read a person like the label on a pack of weenies. You can’t hide any of your shit from Flint, ‘cause you’ve got everything he needs to know right there on your wrapper. It’s a gift. Sometimes it takes the rest of us a little while to catch up to him. You know what he always says? ‘Who you gonna believe?’”

  “I know, ‘Me, or your own lying eyes?’ So, who are you going to believe?”

  Still studying me carefully, he said, “It’s a gift, the way Mike can read a person.”

  I reminded him I needed my car, so he made some calls and got it released. He drove me over to the crime lab garage just east of the civic center and waited to make sure there were no glitches.

  Because I was in the building, I paid a visit to my old friend Sharon Yamasaki, a senior investigator with the coroner’s office. I wanted to know what progress had been made identifying the body found in the remains of Kelsey’s trailer, anything that had been discovered about the fire itself.

  Sharon seemed genuinely happy to see me. Most of her work involves moving official documents from one side of her desk to the other, so I offered her a potentially interesting diversion. She put aside her heavy case load to go hunting for me. I was in her office, halfway through a cup of coffee, when she came in with a couple of files.

  “Everything is preliminary,” she said. “There’s no positive I.D. yet, but there is a profile. The deceased was male, early to late fifties, probably Caucasian, five feet nine to six feet tall, slender build. So far, there are no inconsistencies with the dental records of Detective Jerry Kelsey. Considering the condition of the remains, we may get no closer than that.”

  It wasn’t really news, but I felt a jolt of something akin to pain. What made me sad was the notion that there probably was no one close enough to Kelsey to arrange a proper funeral.

  Sharon sorted through a stack of forms. “The medical examiner was looking for some indication of state of mind, weighing the possibility of suicide over murder. The arson people put that notion aside.

  “The prelim arson report indicates the fire’s point of origin was directly under the living room portion of Kelsey’s trailer. One end of an ordinary garden hose was placed into the gasoline storage tank situated in the yard, the other end of the hose was placed under the trailer, a distance of fifty-three feet. A lit votive candle was placed under the trailer a few feet from the end of the hose. Once the arsonist had begun the siphon effect of the gasoline at the tank end, he had the time it took for the gas to run through the hose and reach the candle at the other end to get the hell away. Then, to use the technical language, kaboom.”

  Elegant, yet simple. Anyone who had seen the layout of that equipment yard could have planned it.

  I rose. “Thank you.”

  Sharon got up with me, walked with me toward the elevators. “I understand we have another acquaintance of yours in residence at the morgue.”

  “Word gets around,” I said.

  “It does when the brass takes special interest.” She held the elevator door open. “The D.A. was on the horn first thing this morning. Wants a twenty-four hour lid put on public statements coming from the crime lab. Idiot forgets we’re civil service. I personally know three people who called the T
imes to make sure they knew exactly what he wanted a lid put on.”

  I invited Sharon and her husband to the housewarming on Saturday and went back down to the garage. Just in case anyone changed his mind about releasing my car, I took it out of the lab garage and reparked it in the lot under the civic center mall.

  The Conklin hearing was scheduled for two, giving me maybe an hour and a half to kill. I took the stairs up to the street level and caught a Dash bus to Chinatown, walked around the neighborhood.

  I first met Mike Flint in Chinatown.

  Ever since the night before, when I watched Roddy O’Leary make his explosive bounce across the pavement, it worried me that thoughts of death had taken up very assertive residence at the front of my mind. I couldn’t shake an unfamiliar sense of melancholy, a distressing preoccupation.

  I’m sure that feeling of doom was why I ended up where my story with Mike had begun, because of all that I hold precious, Mike is in the top two. I stood for a while next to a six-foot plaster Buddha on Hill Street, watched the tourists and the locals go about their shopping, moving at two speeds: tourist stroll versus Chinese housewife sprint. I just stood still like the plaster Buddha, thinking things over. When I decided it was time to walk on, I felt much better.

  The Dash dropped me right in front of the courthouse twenty minutes before the scheduled two o’clock hearing.

  The hall outside the appointed courtroom was dotted by clusters of media teams and their captives; it was like homecoming. Mrs. Rhodes and Etta had their heads together with Ralph Faust. LaShonda and James Shabazz huddled with Jack Riley’s news team. Beth Johnson and a tall young man I guessed was Wyatt, Jr. stood with a third video crew. Leroy Burgess had two cameramen all to himself.

  I ducked at least a dozen microphones that were thrust into my face, and made it, frazzled but intact, into the courtroom.