Bad Intent

by Wendy Hornsby

  “Messing up some pretty nice fish, officer,” James said, offering his hand to Mike.

  “You never did see things quite straight, Shabazz.” Mike put a spatula in the offered hand. “Think you can do better, be my guest.”

  “That’s your own mess. I can’t help you at this point.” James traded the spatula for the long-handled basting brush and slathered more barbecue sauce on the chickens at the far end of the grill. “Not that I could ever help you.”

  “I don’t recall needing your help,” Mike countered.

  “That’s a matter of opinion, officer. Perhaps you failed to see there can be more than one way to approach a problem. For instance, trying to keep young people on the straight and narrow: You used your stick, I preferred the reason of Allah.”

  “Yeah?” I saw a smile lift the corner of Mike’s mustache. “You have an armed crackhead climbing through your window at night, tell me who you’re going to call to save your sorry ass, me or Allah?”

  Shabazz laughed. “At that point, it might be a toss-up.”

  Mike was getting ready with his next line when Bart Conklin walked up. “You two still at it? Some things never change.”

  Bart Conklin introduced his kids to James and Mike and me, said it was like an old neighborhood reunion. When I moved on, the three of them were debating, with about equal energy, how to tell when a chicken is well-cooked and how to keep the current generation of youth from murdering itself into oblivion. No one seemed to be changing any minds, but it appeared they were enjoying sparring.

  There was a full contingency of dancers. Mischa brought his lover, a costume designer. Casey had her weekend guests from San Francisco, Stacy and Lisa, and some new friends from school to keep her entertained. The dance crowd took over a back corner of the garden, and were certainly more ornamental in their flowered dresses than the fading summer roses.

  Lyle, my former housemate, was happy in the kitchen, making sure platters stayed full, rearranging all my drawers and cupboards.

  Oscar appointed himself bartender and beer sampler. He presided over the keg, growing more voluble as the evening progressed. I heard him go into at least three versions of a CHP raid on his old body shop.

  I knew Michael had invited his mother. I didn’t know how I felt about her coming until he showed up instead with the girl from his Asian lit class, with little Sly, and with a box of cookies from Leslie. Surprised me how relieved I was that she had not come. Sly walked with new assurance in new sneakers, smaller models of the ones Michael wore.

  Besides Leslie, there were other significant no-shows. Beth Johnson felt her new husband would be uncomfortable around people involved in any way with Wyatt. Linda Westman had to work. Jack Riley was away on assignment. Charlene sent a carnivorous-looking orchid plant and her regrets, though we had not invited her.

  Our work crew brought assorted family and significant others and showed off their handiwork in endless guided tours across the freshly varnished floors, through the stacks of unpacked boxes and furniture still draped in shipping pads. From the backyard, I waved up at an ever-changing audience leaning over my bedroom balcony.

  Early helpers had found what was needed to furnish the living room and had arranged sofas and tables for those who wanted to escape the Cajun-sauce-scented pollution coming from Mike’s cuisine in progress.

  There were contingencies that tended to stick together: Mike’s co-workers and my colleagues, though some were acquainted, ghettoized themselves from the beginning; news people and police have a natural aversion for each other. I think it was Ralph Faust, egged on by Lana Howard, who first breached the invisible barrier by bringing up the shooting of Baron Marovich.

  “What’s the official story?” Ralph asked Mike’s lieutenant.

  “Misadventure,” was the lieutenant’s sarcastic answer. “D.A. said he was packing up his desk, forgot the gun was in there, didn’t know it was loaded. When he picked the damn thing up, it went off. Accidentally.”

  “Do you buy that?” Ralph asked. He reached out and drew me in, wrapped his arm around me. Trapped me.

  Before he gave his answer, the lieutenant, a thirty-year man, looked around at the circle of friends, all senior detectives who had surely heard every possible lame excuse. What he got back from them was cynical head scratching, scowls, world-weary shrugs, snickers, and guffaws.

  Grinning at his men like a fond papa, the lieutenant answered Ralph, “Do I believe that piece-of-shit accident story? Fuck no. Old B.M. sees his campaign go down the toilet so he gives out his sad little resignation letter. ‘I’m such a Boy Scout,’ he says, ‘I can’t fight dirty no more.’

  “Then he takes his squeeze down to the Biltmore bar and gets blasted on high-dollar champagne—people saw them together, packing away champagne and caviar. Maybe she turns him down, too, ‘cause when she leaves him alone, he goes up to his office—he’s juiced, he’s depressed, and his wife already told him she didn’t want no more of what he has to offer—he gets out his old twenty-two and tries to eat it. Hell, he can’t even do that right.”

  “Maybe he changed his mind,” I said. “Maybe he just wanted to find out if anyone loved him.”

  The lieutenant looked at me as if I had just farted or something. Ralph pulled me closer, whispered in my ear, “If I’d known how much you liked high-dollar champagne, I would have taken a couple of cases with us to El Salvador.”

  I said to him, “Do you still fuck chickens?” Then I moved on, thinking about how variable truth truly is. How many thousand people were standing in Dealy Plaza the day Kennedy was shot? How many of them can tell you, with provable, incontrovertible certainty, what happened? Forget about why.

  What do we ever know, anyway? Except what we want to believe, based on what someone wants us to hear.

  What was Wyatt Johnson up to the night he was shot? I didn’t know. Someday, Charles Conklin might come clean, maybe for a good book or movie deal, or to make a deal the next time he’s picked up. If he does, whether his intentions are good or bad I would never trust what he has to say. I would never know. Not knowing is always the hard part for me.

  In my own mind, I was fairly certain that both Hanna Rhodes and Jerry Kelsey had been eliminated to keep them from floating their own versions of events at an inconvenient time: fouling up a high-dollar wrongful imprisonment suit, injecting too much truth into a political campaign, messing up evangelical profiteering, impeding a fast climb up the career ladder.

  Cheap motives for such costly results. Three dead, one I had killed myself. The surviving players weren’t walking away unmarked. The self-inflicted crease in Marovich’s broad brow was only the beginning of his problems. Jennifer was going up before the Bar Association, and the police were trying to put together a conspiracy charge against her.

  The county fired George Schwartz for taking a job when he was out on disability. There was a fraud charge against him, and a lien to recoup the disability payments.

  Charles Pinkerton Conklin? The D.A. decided not to retry him for shooting Wyatt Johnson; he had already served more time than most murderers draw. I knew it was only a matter of time until he tripped himself up again, went back inside. I regretted that he couldn’t be hung with a big sign like a cigarette warning label: Association with this man may be hazardous to your health.

  Mike rang a gong to announce that he had done all the damage to the food that he intended to do. Lyle had arranged the remains on large serving trays, disguised the worst of it with sprigs of parsley and lilies made out of turnip slices and carrot sticks, and set it all out on paper-covered plank tables.

  When Mike walked away from the smoke, I went over to him. His face ran with sweat and he reeked like a fireman after a slaughterhouse fire. While our guests queued up to the long serving table, I took Mike by the hand and led him into the house and up the stairs, hugging the wall so that the upstairs tourers could become downstairs diners.

  “Sure, I’ll take a shower,” he said, fondling my butt through my s
kirt, “if you’ll get in with me.”

  “You know I want to, baby,” I said, helping him off with his apron and shirt. “But if I do, you know what would follow and all those poor people would be stuck in the backyard till the sun came up waiting to say good-bye to us. It could get really ugly down there. Just this once, I think you better solo.”

  “Okay,” he said, taking off his pants without help—though it broke my heart—while I ran the water warm. When he handed me his pants, my eyes were not on his outstretched palm, or on the little gold box he offered me. “Something for you,” he said.

  “I need to get back to our guests,” I said, and fled without going within two feet of that little box. I had to stop in the bedroom to wipe my own streaming eyes, to get some air.

  At that moment, I loved Mike so much that I could barely contain my passion for him. All evening I had hardly been able to keep from jumping him—apron, spatula, smoke, and all—right there in the middle of things. But that damned gold box chilled me. For the second time.

  I powdered my nose and fluffed my hair, got another breath of barbecue-scented air, and ran down to the backyard.

  Lyle set down a bowl of fruit salad and intercepted me as I walked across the patio. He led me by the hand into the kitchen and handed me a wet towel.

  “Aren’t you having fun?” he demanded.

  “Of course. It’s a great party, Lyle.”

  “Then what are you crying about?”

  I draped myself on him and buried my face in his neck. “God, I miss you.”

  “Not that much, you don’t. You two fighting?”

  “No.” I wiped my face again. “Mike’s pushing this marriage thing.”

  “So?”

  “So, I’m not ready.”

  “The new tenants like the house,” he said. “I told them I would talk to you about a lease. What do you want me to say?”

  I stood up straight, blew my nose into a paper napkin. “I’ll lease it for two years, four months, three weeks.”

  “You have to face things, Maggie,” he said. “Don’t put it off too long.”

  “Maybe I exaggerated about how much I miss you.” I walked outside again.

  As soon as the sun went down, the air grew chilly. I thought about going upstairs for a sweater, but hesitated when I saw that Mike was not down yet.

  Michael was filling a plate for Sly when he called my name. “Where’s Dad?”

  “Cleaning up.”

  I followed Michael’s gaze up to the balcony. Mike was standing there, leaning on the railing, looking down at me. I helped Sly butter a roll, then excused myself.

  Mike was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. I walked into his arms.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, his breath hot against my ear. “I was teasing. I didn’t mean to upset you like that.”

  His chest heaved under my cheek. I opened the top two buttons of his fresh shirt, ran my hand inside along his smooth, hard chest.

  “What’s in the box this time?” I asked.

  He laughed, an embarrassed little laugh. But he handed me the damn gold box again. I opened it, like before. Found a gold key inside, like before.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Back door key this time.”

  I wrapped my arms around him. I think it was letdown that I felt. The only reality I knew at that moment was how I felt about Mike Flint.

  “We should go down,” I said.

  When Mike said, “Why?” and began working on the zipper of my skirt, I couldn’t think of a single reason.