“Don’t make so much of it,” he growled on the other end of the phone. “I need a little lesson is all. On mitigation and the death penalty.”
I’d unwillingly come straight home from my visit to Dr. Nadelman. What I’d really wanted to do was whip over to the Palisades and shake Susan Sullivan until she told me exactly who Bobby’s father was and what was going on. Instead, I’d been treated to a hysterical phone call from my husband. It seemed life on the planet could not continue without a certain lavender tutu that had disappeared off the face of the earth. I described various possible tutu hiding places over the phone, to no avail. Finally, and not a little frustrated, I agreed to come home and search for the offending bit of gauze myself. It took me about three minutes to locate it crumpled in a corner of Ruby’s dollhouse, where it had been doing service as the carpet in the master bedroom. I was getting ready to throttle both Peter and Ruby when the phone rang.
“And why do you need my help?” I asked Al.
“Because I took a case, and I want to make sure I’m up on exactly what the hell I should be doing here.”
“Details?” I leaned back in the kitchen chair, wrapped the phone cord around my finger, and put my feet up on the table. The kids were in Ruby’s room playing Barbie. Peter had retired to his office in a huff and was most likely rearranging his first-series Mego Star Trek action figures (still in the original packaging). I could be confident of a few moments of tranquillity.
“It’s a death penalty case, and the attorney hired me to replace the mitigation investigator, who went out on maternity leave. Might I say, at this point, that you ladies are never going to get anywhere in your careers if you keep dropping the ball to drop a baby?”
“No, you might not. Okay. So you were hired to help the defense attorney flush out information that will convince the jury to give the guy life without parole and not a lethal injection.”
“Exactly. Only I’ve never done a mitigation case before. The lawyer seems like a decent enough guy, for a lawyer, but he dumped the file in my lap without a heck of a lot of explanation or direction. I want to make sure that I’m investigating the right things. You know, finding things that will actually be useful. No point in coming up with a file full of crap.”
“True enough. Okay, here’s what I’ll do. I’m no expert on the death penalty myself. I’ll do a little research, find a couple of articles that describe what specific kinds of things can be used in mitigation of a death sentence, and put it all together for you. When do you need this by?”
“Whenever. Yesterday.”
“Seriously.”
“Well, you got any time today?”
I cocked an ear to the kids. They’d probably let me do a little legal research. I could always toss them in front of the television if I needed to. With Peter working on a mood, I wasn’t going to be able to get away to confront Bobby’s birth mother anytime soon, at least not without the kids. And I wasn’t about to bring them along to what might end up being a confrontation verging on the ugly.
“Sure, I could put in a couple of hours right now,” I told Al.
“Let’s do this. Do what you can today, and then meet me tomorrow. There’s something I want to show you, anyway.” He gave me an address in downtown L.A.
“Where am I meeting you?” I asked him.
“It’s a surprise.”
THE true surprise was how nice all the folks were at the indoor firing range. When I’d pulled up in front of the long, low building painted a pale blue, with an oversized mural of cartoon figures pointing weapons, and saw where it was Al had directed me, I’d had to cool off for a few minutes before going inside. Al knew how I felt about guns. I’d always been a proponent of gun control, but getting shot while eight-and-a-half-months pregnant had pretty well sealed my disgust for side arms and their devotees. In the wake of that nightmare, Al had showed up at the hospital with a bouquet of carnations and a little pearl-handled pistol, complete with its own Roma leather lady’s gun purse. I’d sent him and his armory packing. Now, here he was, trying once again to convert me into a gun-toting member of the NRA.
It was, however, hard to stay angry when everyone was so superfriendly. I walked into the building under the banner proudly proclaiming it to be the city’s largest indoor firearm range and was greeted by a smiling young man in an Oxford-cloth button-down shirt. He complimented me on my Dodgers cap and invited me to wait for Al in the lounge, a friendly little room with a bank of vinyl chairs and a gurgling coffeemaker. A pleasant, middle-aged woman with gray blue hair molded into perfect curls pressed a flyer about “Ladies’ Night” at the range into my hands and complimented me on my new red jeans. Everyone there seemed to like how I dressed.
I willed myself to avoid the plate of doughnuts and home-made cookies sitting invitingly next to the coffee machine and finally compromised by taking just half of a honey-glazed. I was licking my fingers after finishing the second half (it seemed rude to leave a half-eaten doughnut just sitting there on the plate) and leafing through a brochure urging me to practice my shotgun skills with some AA Flyer Clay Targets when Al finally showed up.
“Why are we meeting here?” I asked.
He dumped the black nylon duffel bag he was carrying over his shoulder onto one of the vinyl chairs.
“I needed to get some target practice in. What do you have for me?”
I spent about fifteen minutes describing the various facts about a murderer’s history that the California courts consider relevant in determining whether he should be executed for his crimes. I’d printed out a good law review article on the subject. Al was grateful both for the article and for the information.
“You see,” he said, “this is why you should go into business with me. You figure out the legal stuff, and I do the legwork. We’d be a good team.”
“You do the legwork? Please. When I was at the federal defender’s office, I didn’t just sit behind a desk. You and I went out in the field together. Or have you gotten too senile to remember our days interviewing methamphetamine addicts and robbery witnesses?”
“Prove it,” he said with a smile.
“Prove what?”
“Prove that you’re capable of doing something other than prancing around a courtroom. Come shoot with me.”
I gave a disgusted snort. “How would that prove anything? I don’t have to shoot a gun to show that I can investigate a crime. I didn’t carry a gun when I tracked down my baby-sitter after she’d disappeared. I didn’t carry a gun when I confronted Abigail Hathaway’s murderer.”
“Yeah, well, maybe if you had been the one carrying a weapon, you wouldn’t have been the one bleeding on the floor.”
I was about to launch into a speech about how people who own guns are more likely to be shot with their own weapons than they are to shoot anyone else but bit back the words. Al and I had had this fight too many times before.
“Speaking of investigations, have you found out anything new about your trainer?” Al asked. Clearly he also wanted to preempt our all-too-familiar debate.
I gave him a quick synopsis of the confusing search for Bobby’s birth parents.
“I’m beginning to wonder if any of this is even related to his death,” I said.
Al shrugged his shoulders and said, “My operating assumption has always been that there are no coincidences. Here this guy shoots himself—”
“Or someone shoots him,” I interrupted. “Don’t forget the Palm Pilot.”
“You’re really stuck on that, aren’t you?”
“I just don’t think someone would order a Palm Pilot on-line and then kill himself before it even has a chance to arrive. And, anyway, Bobby just wasn’t a depressed kind of guy.”
“Okay, either he shoots himself, or someone shoots him, and he just so happens to have recently found out that he’s adopted and is looking for his biological parents. It’s got to be linked.”
“Because there are no such things as coincidences.”
“Exact
ly.”
“It’s a good theory. It’s certainly the one I’ve been operating on. There’s just one problem with it.”
“What?”
“There are such things as coincidences. They happen all the time.”
He shrugged again.
“Hey, you wouldn’t consider doing me the usual favor and calling one of your LAPD buddies to check on the status of the case, would you?” I asked.
“Sure, if you do one other thing for me.”
“Anything!”
“Come shoot with me.”
I rolled my eyes. “No.”
“Listen to me for a minute. I know you’re opposed to the idea of people carrying guns, but don’t you think your arguments might carry a little more weight if you actually knew what you were talking about? Try it. Take a couple of practice shots. You might find out that you like it.”
“I won’t like it.”
“How do you know, until you try?”
So I did.
And I did. Like it, that is.
Fourteen
DESPITE the bright yellow sign informing us that the range was equipped to handle semiautomatic pistols, rifles, and even fully automatic machine guns, and that they would happily rent those weapons out to us if we didn’t bring our own, Al gave me a small handgun to shoot with. It was black, and heavy, and the handle warmed up quickly in my sweating palm.
He stood behind me in the little booth and watched as I held out the gun with a shaking arm, took aim at a pink silhouette on a sliding metal rack, and jerked the trigger back. Nothing happened.
“Safety’s on,” Al said.
“What?” I asked, lifting up my ear guards.
“Safety.” He took the gun from me and disengaged the safety with a practiced thumb. “Squeeze the trigger. Don’t jerk.”
“What?” I had the ear guards back in place.
“Squeeze. Gently,” he said once I’d freed up an ear.
“Oh. Okay. Like a camera. Squeeze.” I aimed as best I could and squeezed. The gun went off with a muffled bang, and my arm jerked. I squinted at the target. To my utter astonishment, there was a mark on the lower left-hand side of the target. I’d hit it.
“Wow!” I said. “I must be a natural. Check that out.”
“Not bad. Try again.”
The next time, however, I was anticipating the recoil. I couldn’t help but flinch as I pulled the trigger. I looked up at the target. It had suffered no further damage.
I raised my eyebrows at Al and said, “Gee, you’re right. It is too bad I didn’t have a gun when I was investigating the Hathaway murder. I could have fired at her killer and missed. That would have been both smart and effective, don’t you think?”
My sarcasm was lost on Al. He motioned at me, and I lifted up the ear guards. “Why don’t you try keeping your eyes open,” he said.
That’s when I started having fun. The next time, I opened my eyes, lined up the target in my sights, and squeezed the trigger, reminding myself not to flinch in anticipation of the recoil. I blasted a hole at the bottom of the target, just where a man might find it most painful.
After that, I couldn’t be stopped. I fired single rounds, taking careful aim. That soon got boring, and I experimented with emptying my gun into the target as quickly as I could. I turned down Al’s offer of his shotgun and instead tried out his M-9 semiautomatic pistol. The thing weighed at least two pounds, and it took me a while to figure out how to keep the nose up and my arm steady. Once I had that down, however, it was a little distressing how much fun I had firing off the fifteen rounds.
After a couple of hours, Al and I repaired to an early lunch of doughnuts and coffee.
“I told you I’d make a convert out of you,” he said.
I snorted the coffee out of my nose. Wiping at the brown stain on my white T-shirt, I shook my head. “Al, you really don’t get it, do you?”
“What?”
“I’m not surprised that I had fun. I mean, there’s a reason millions of adolescent boys spend all their free time and money in arcades playing Cop-killer or whatever those games are called. Target shooting is fun. I don’t have a problem with target shooting. If guns were only available at shooting ranges, I’d be perfectly happy. It’s the fact that any certified lunatic can buy an assault rifle and mow down a preschool class that bugs me. Or the fact that every single one of my gang-banger clients has an arsenal the size of a National Guard unit. By the way, their guns are legally purchased as often as not. It’s the availability of a deadly toy that I find so problematic, not that people have fun playing with them.”
He opened his mouth, but I didn’t give him time to interrupt. “And don’t you dare offer to give me one for my own protection. I have two kids, one of whom is a gun nut. I’m not bringing a gun into my house,” I said.
I recognized the look that crossed over his face. His eyes held a very definite “Now’s the time to teach them gun safety” kind of gleam. But, to my relief, he snapped his mouth shut in a thin line and even, after a moment or two, managed a smile.
“Well, intelligent minds can disagree, I suppose,” he said.
“Yup.” I nodded.
TRUE to his word, Al used his cell phone to call a couple of his buddies at the LAPD. His old partner was at his desk and put him on hold while he made a call to the Santa Monica Police Department, where Bobby’s case was lodged. He was back within minutes. Al nodded and thanked the guy.
“Well?” I said.
“Closed. Cause of death deemed suicide.”
“Are they absolutely sure?”
Al shrugged. “Who knows. But they closed the case.”
I stared at him for a moment. “Yeah, well, I haven’t closed mine,” I said.
Fifteen
IN order to get out to meet Al unencumbered by children, I had dropped Ruby off at a friend’s for an all-day playdate and left Isaac sitting in our bed watching a Zaboomafoo marathon on PBS, a sports bottle of chocolate milk in one hand and a defrosted bagel in the other. Peter hadn’t even woken up when I’d rolled him over to make room for his son, and I’d given Isaac strict instructions that if he needed anything, he should kick his father until he gained consciousness. Despite the fact that I’d left the house almost three hours before, neither of the men in my life had budged.
Isaac’s eyes were glazed over from watching three hours of the Kratt brothers engaging in their particular brand of frenzied animal-watching—sort of like Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom but on speed and with better jokes.
“Hi Mama. I’m a lemur,” my son told me when I walked in the room. He’d eaten his bagel and used his chocolate milk to paint his face with a couple of lemurish black stripes.
“So you are. Is Daddy still asleep?”
“Yeah.”
“Did he wake up at all?”
“Yeah, but he didn’t want to watch TV, so he put the pillow over his head.”
It was nice to know I wasn’t the only neglectful parent in the house. I scooped Isaac out of bed, set him gently on the floor, and whipped the covers off my insentient husband with a shriek that wouldn’t have embarrassed a banshee. He leapt about sixteen feet in the air.
“Good morning, darling,” I purred.
He growled at me and stomped off to the shower. I followed him into the bathroom and leaned against the cold tile wall.
“I’m going to need you to spend some more of that fabulous quality time with Isaac today,” I shouted over the sound of the water.
He grunted.
I didn’t call Susan before driving over to her house. I figured there was a good chance I’d catch her at home on a Sunday afternoon, and I didn’t want to give her the chance to avoid me. The sense of righteous indignation that I’d felt after talking to Reuben Nadelman had abated somewhat, but I was still eager to confront her with what I knew. If I caught her unawares, she was less likely to be able to come up with another in the series of half-truths and outright lies with which she had already tried to confus
e me.
I pulled up the long driveway, wondering how once again mine were the only tire tracks in the combed gravel. Did the Sullivan family drive hovercraft? Salud obviously had Sundays off, because a handsome older man with pale, blondish gray hair and a weather-beaten face answered the door. He looked like a man who spent a lot of time outside, even if just on the golf course. He was wiry and thin, but his height gave him the impression of bulk.
“Yes? Can I help you?” he asked.
“Hello, I’m Juliet Applebaum. I’m a . . . a friend of Susan’s. Is she in?”
He sized me up for a minute, not having missed the stumble my voice made over the word friend. I got the feeling that very little got by this man.
“Please come in.” He led me through the now-familiar entranceway and back into a large, sunny kitchen. Half of the room was a fairly unremarkable kitchen with the usual cabinetry and appliances. The other half was graced with an impressive oversized stone fireplace, in front of which stood a large, round oak table. The table was set with pretty blue and white dishes and contained the remains of what had obviously been an elaborate brunch. There was a half-eaten platter of berries carefully arranged by color, and a wicker basket with a bright blue gingham ribbon and a few crumbly muffins and croissants nestled in a matching napkin. Susan sat flanked by two handsome, blond men in their mid-to late twenties. I recognized one as the young man who had pushed Isaac on the swing. The other was clearly his older brother. The two looked remarkably alike, and they both resembled Bobby to an uncanny degree. He, too, had possessed those same handsome, innocuous features and surfer-boy, blond hair.
A pregnant woman in a pale pink sweater that precisely matched her lipstick, her dark hair held back by a thick velvet band, also sat at the table. Near the fireplace, in a low armchair, sat an elderly woman dressed in a severe navy suit tied at the neck with a floppy white bow. Her long, wrinkled earlobes were weighed down by huge, yellowish diamonds that looked like they could use a cleaning, and she was speaking as I came into the room.
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