Strawgirl

by Abigail Padgett

  "You're back!" Estrella exclaimed, lurching through the door burdened with case files, a briefcase, and a white paper bag from which rose the odor of the forbidden.

  "French fries." Bo replied. "I'll pay anything. I'll wash your car with imported shampoo, train Mildred to howl 'Cielito Lindo' under your window, paint a brooding portrait of Henry for your mantel ..."

  "My car's clean, I despise 'Cielito Lindo' and so does Mildred, and Henry doesn't brood." Estrella grinned. "You've forgotten that French fries are fattening. So what happened in New York? Madge got so upset when she heard you blew it that she publicly threatened to wire your desk with plastic explosives. She mentioned fire ants, too. And something about a sheet metal box in the blazing sun."

  "Madge watches too many old movies on TV." Bo nodded. "And what she's really done is to put me on probation and threaten to terminate my employment. But I'll tell you what really happened for everything in that bag."

  "Deal."

  As the story progressed Bo noticed Estrella's expression run the gamut from mere interest to near-Presbyterian disapproval. The latter was so incongruous Bo had to laugh.

  "See?" Estrella shook a pencil at the space between her desk and Bo's. "You're laughing. This isn't funny. You're a party to evasion of a court order. You've gone too far this time, Bo, and if you're not crazy you'll meet this Broussard woman and Hannah when their plane lands tonight and take Hannah straight to the county receiving home. You filed the petition yourself. You can't just turn around and decide you don't think she should be in the system. She's already in the system and you're already in trouble! This is dangerous, Bo. You wouldn't be doing this if you were—"

  "If I were what? Still taking lithium?" Bo experienced a bitterness that by now felt dusty, historical. How many times in one day would she have to defend a decision that, while unorthodox, was obviously right?

  "Let's get something straight," she began, standing to lean backward against her desk, her arms crossed over a stomach already protesting the greasy food she'd just wolfed. "There's no question that even the best foster home would be damaging for Hannah right now. Madge would chew off her own right hand before bending the rules enough to let Hannah stay with Eva. The job here is, ostensibly, to protect children. And lithium or not, the only way to protect this child is to break the rules. I'm sick of hearing how I should be on medication every time I exercise what amounts to simple common sense. It's not my fault this system's a factory, and it's not your job to measure every decision I make for symptoms of madness. Either you're my friend and you trust me, or you're not and you don't. Which is it?"

  "Wow!" Estrella breathed beneath raised eyebrows. "Okay, okay. We're friends. I trust you. And from what you've said, you're right about Hannah. But Bo, if this gets out you're not only out of a job, you could go to jail for contempt of court!"

  Bo felt her lips curl in an impish grin. "I've got an ace in the hole. No problem."

  "What ace?"

  "A proposal of marriage.Fairly wealthy guy but a bit stuffy for my taste. Still, it's a backup if prison looms."

  Estrella looked as if she'd swallowed a Ping-Pong ball.

  "LaMarche? You're kidding!"

  "Tell you about it later when I pick up Mildred from your place. Right now I have to call a lawyer, go see Massieu in jail, and meet Eva and Hannah on a 5:56 flight."

  After Solon Gentzler agreed to a Saturday breakfast meeting and seven phone calls finally isolated the fact that Paul Massieu had accidentally been taken to the county jail rather than the city jail where he should have been, Bo scanned her desk for anything that couldn't wait until Monday. In the pile of pink phone memos were six more denying the existence of Jonas Lee Crowley's father, eleven that could wait, and one with no call-back number.

  "Satan called," the last message told her. "Will phone again."

  Probably a prank, she told herself. Maybe just a joke by somebody in the message center. Some joke. Crumpling the pink slip to a tight ball, she banked it off the wall and into the wastebasket.

  "Nice shot," Estrella observed.

  "I hope so," Bo answered. Outside the office window a eucalyptus tree shuddered as the afternoon began its descent toward darkness.

  Chapter 15

  John D. Litten left the boy's club at 5:10, near the end of the business staff's Friday afternoon exit. Most people left early on Friday. Litten made it a point to be seen keeping precisely the hours demanded in his job description. Always.

  He would have liked to hang around awhile, maybe watched some kids in one of the playrooms. But he'd done that last week under the guise of inspecting a sand table for possible replacement. A little boy in nylon shorts had repeatedly brushed Litten's thigh as the child pushed a plastic alligator through the sand. Leaving, Litten had pulled off his suit jacket and carried it casually over the bouncing bulge in his pants. He'd barely made it to the men's room. Too dangerous right now to play around like that. Probably too dangerous to stay in town.

  In the hospital's parking lot he waved to Ben Skiff and considered closing the whole San Diego operation. It had been easy to set up, no big deal to let go of it. In these border towns it was a joke how easy it was to find just the right woman, desperate for money and more than willing to look the other way for enough of it. Some woman as stupid and hungry as Gramma. All you had to do was set up the place, hire the woman, let her handle it, and drop in from time to time for a little noontime delight. If things got hot, you just walked. No way to trace a property rented in the name of some dead guy from another state.

  He'd learned to do that in the navy, too. When John Litten discovered that close to ten thousand dollars' worth of equipment was missing and traced the paper to a career noncom named Verlen Piva, Piva made a deal. In exchange for learning how Piva was saving up a nice nest egg for his retirement from the navy at thirty-five, Litten would ignore what he'd discovered. It was, Piva told him, the simplest thing in the world to walk into any town, check the old newspaper obits for the name of some guy near your age who'd bought the farm when he was a kid. Then you could get copies of the dead guy's birth certificate. With this you could get a Social Security card, driver's license, open bank accounts in Mexico where the IRS couldn't touch you. Instant identity. Untraceable.

  The rest of Piva's lesson, about fencing off military equipment to surplus stores and a hundred organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, fell on deaf ears. John Litten had a better idea and a different need entirely. As soon as he got out of the navy he tried it. And it worked.

  There'd been one foul-up in Gulfport, Mississippi, when they'd nearly nailed him. But he'd put on his old uniform, murmured something at the bus terminal about trying to get home to Montgomery, Alabama, before his mama died of cancer there in the hospital, and beat it out of town. In Mobile he'd got off the bus and hitchhiked to Miami, where it had been easy to start all over. It was always easy. John Litten sometimes wondered who his father was, because his mother's family put together didn't have the brains he had in his little finger. Still, he always kept a couple of military uniforms pressed and ready. People loved to believe a man in uniform was honest. And he didn't settle in any more small towns. Only big cities where nobody knew anybody's business. Or cared.

  Back in his apartment John Litten nuked a frozen dinner and knocked it back with a line of cocaine and two ice-cold cans of Yoo-Hoo. The milky drink tasted just like the stuff called Chocolate Soldier when he was a kid. Jonny Dale couldn't have Chocolate Soldier very often. Just watery powdered milk Gramma got in big boxes from the county. Now John D. could have as much as he liked. And anything else he liked.

  Selecting a Scandinavian video from his collection hidden beneath a false floor in a kitchen cabinet, he watched a skinny blond boy suck off a fat man wearing nothing but a feather boa and a Viking helmet. The video was an old one. Boring. He'd only bought it for the scene where the naked children throw cake batter on each other in a kitchen. That was classic. But the fat man was a downer. Litten didn't even bo
ther to jerk off. He had something else on his mind. Something different and more exciting than any video. And what it felt like was revenge.

  Last night had been risky, breaking into that church. And then when he'd stumbled against a podium or something up there on the left side of the altar and all of a sudden that church song called the doxology was blaring, echoing in the emptiness, and he'd dropped the spray paintfrom his plastic-gloved hand and run like hell out into the night, that was scary. The music had followed him out into the dark where he'd crouched inside a huge bougainvillea and watched as a guard and two nuns scuttled through the open church door and turned on the lights. The music had stopped then, but he knew it was the doxology. Gramma took him to a Baptist church in Estherville sometimes. They sang it there, too. He wondered if the music was a message from Gramma that she liked the way he was getting even with the stupidity. Except Gramma had been stupid, too. So maybe it was just nothing.

  But today wasn't nothing. Today at work, when the newspapers came and everybody was reading them with their coffee and talking about Satanists painting the church, John Litten felt something even better than he felt with the kids. He felt control. An immense control that reached out over a whole city like an invisible hand. His hand. He had them all in his hand. All the stupid assholes who thought they knew something. The police, the newspapers, the churches. And that woman named Ganage who'd started the whole thing with her stupid crap about Satan. They wanted a Satan? He'd give them one. And squeeze their nuts until they saw themselves for what they were. Stupid. Inferior.

  He'd started today. Just made a few phone calls. To the police detective named Reinert, to the stupid social worker or whatever she was who messed up getting the dead kid's sister, to the psychologist, Cynthia Ganage. They were all stupid. The messages were all the same.

  Padding into the kitchen in Gold-Toe socks, John Litten replaced the videotape in its hiding place, made sure he had enough coke for a couple of lines later, and shoved the two Yoo-Hoo cans and the frozen dinner tray into the trash compactor. He felt like Superman, like a king, like somebody who can tell Superman and every king in the world exactly what to do. Like somebody who can kill Superman and all the kings if he wants to. And he does. They're all so stupid he wants to kill them, but there are too many.

  Changing to a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts to look like a tourist, Litten headed out for the strip where the youngest hookers hung out. He'd bring one back for a while maybe. Dress her up in the angel costume. But the prospect held little excitement.

  What was exciting was the game he was playing with a whole city of morons. And the fact that when the time came, he was going to kill one of them just for being stupid. He wondered which one it would be.

  Chapter 16

  It hadn't been easy to get into San Diego County's deteriorating jail to see Paul Massieu. Bo was glad the deputies enlisted to bring him back from New York had mistakenly left him in the same jail as the other man they'd picked up on the trip, whose alleged crime had taken place outside the city limits. In the mix-up she'd been able to fast-talk her way into a technically unauthorized visit, which was also technically a felony, if anybody noticed. But nobody would.

  Behind the chipped black-enameled grille in the jail's barren waiting area, only one woman sat amid piles of greasy manila folders. An open bottle of nail polish remover atop an inverted romance novel revealed that Bo had interrupted meditative pursuits best enjoyed in solitude. The other staff were gone for the day. From a dusty radio Willie Nelson's voice, if not his words, was recognizable.

  "Yeah, whaddaya want?" the woman said with a lack of bon vivance born, Bo was sure, of innumerable unpleasant conversations with previous visitors to the jail.

  Bo undipped the Child Protective Services ID badge from her blouse and slipped it under the grille.

  "I have permission to visit a prisoner named Paul Massieu," she said.

  "This isn't visiting hours."

  "I know. But there are mitigating circumstances that I've already discussed with the desk sergeant. I've agreed to speak with Mr. Massieu in the regular visitors' area to save trouble. You should have an order to that effect."

  "Oh, yeah. Just wait."

  There was no place to sit. Bo paced the bare corridor, reading and rereading a sign explaining in both English and Spanish that to bring drugs or alcohol into the jail was a felony. The sign matched the one outside the building, which had told her unauthorized conversations with prisoners were also felonious. Felonies seemed popular. Finally the woman bawled "Bradley?" in the empty hallway as if trying to be heard over a crowd. A deputy appeared from a battered metal door and wordlessly indicated another battered metal door, which he unlocked and motioned Bo to enter.

  Inside, ten stools bolted to both the cement floor and the wall faced ten small, metal-paned windows. Beneath each window on the left was a wall phone, matched by one in an identical room on the other side of the wall. Well, not quite identical, Bo noticed. The walls of the visitors' side had recently been painted. Baby blue and dirty white. The prisoners-side walls were bare concrete. As Bo stood breathing the rotting grapefruit smell of enamel paint, a door opened on the other side and a prisoner in jail blues approached one of the tiny windows, sat and picked up the phone. Bo sat opposite, and picked up hers.

  "Allo?" he said softly. "Oo are you?"

  The accent was like Eva Broussard's, only magnified. The voice held a tremolo of fear.

  "My name is Bo Bradley. I work for San Diego County's Child Protective Services, and Hannah Franer is one of my cases," she said into the phone, watching his face through the window. "You are the sole suspect in the rape-murder of

  Hannah's sister, Samantha. Serious charges, Mr. Massieu. Are you guilty of them?"

  The frontal approach.Most likely to produce a telling response, if not a forthright answer. Bo watched as his right hand tightened around the plastic phone receiver held against an impressive upper jaw. The hand wore a patchwork of scar tissue and was missing its little finger. A bulky man, Paul Massieu might have looked simian except for a sort of intellectual refinement that seemed to cloak him like filtered light. He returned her interrogative stare with deep-set black eyes. Outrage, pain, confusion. But no menace. Not a hint of the disguised contempt Bo had seen in the eyes of many men who preyed upon women and children.

  "When I met Bonnie," he began, struggling for precision in an uncomfortable language, "Sammi was very little. She did not know her real father. Hannah could remember him, but Sammi could not. I became like a father to Sammi." He breathed deeply and went on. "To have the trust of children is ... is honor, oui?"

  Bo had to nod in agreement.

  "I would never break that honor. You will either believe or not ... I could never hurt a little child. Not in any way."

  Behind the riveted playhouse-sized window he exhaled. He'd answered the question. And Bo believed him. San Diego's downtown airport was conveniently only blocks from the county jail, and Bo left Paul Massieu in plenty of time to meet Eva and Hannah's plane from Albany. Eating a bag of sourdough chips near the arrival gate she wondered why a man like Massieu—apparently healthy, intelligent, educated—would think he saw space aliens on a New York mountainside. Bo knew about delusions, about things seeming to have meaning that wasn't ordinarily there. The decaying body of an opossum on a freeway shoulder highlighted and terrible—a symbol of mindless human sprawl and its slaughter of nature. In an Italian restaurant a cheap candle flickering in a red glass had once brought Bo to tears with its message of the frailty of life, and the valor in not giving up. Emotional images. The stock-in-trade of manic depression. Always there.

  But Paul Massieu had not seen just a rock or shrub that felt like a message from the universe; he'd actually observed something physical that shouldn't have been there. A hallucination, then. Except that Eva had said Paul didn't use drugs and had no brain injury or disorder that might produce hallucinations. So what had happened to Paul Massieu on that mountain? And for th
at matter why was it that unusual things always seemed to happen to people hanging around on mountains alone at night? Especially, according to Bo's grandmother, in Ireland.

  Bo remembered the story of a now-dead kinsman named Paddy Danaher who threw a loaf-sized stone down a Poule-duve, a fairy-hole, on a mountain called Knockfierna late one night, only to have it thrown back in his face. Paddy Danaher's nose, Bo's grandmother had smiled, was crooked for the rest of his life. The wages of disbelief in shining creatures on mountains. Bo rubbed the bridge of her nose as the plane pulled into its gate.

  "Could the silver people on the mountain just be fairies?" she greeted Eva Broussard and the tired, silent Hannah.

  "You 'ave 'ad a long day, Bo. No?" Eva answered, her accent as thick as Paul's from exhaustion. "And your maiden name will be something like O'Rourke, am I right?"

  "O'Reilly." Bo blushed. "And yes, it's been an interminable day. Let's get out of here before somebody recognizes us. Let's take our young lady safely to her castle on the beach where you both can get some rest. I just came from a visit with Paul," she said, leaning down to make eye contact with Hannah. "He's doing fine. And he can't wait to see you."

  The child turned her freckled face abruptly from Bo's, but a nervous smile struggled at the corners of her mouth. Bo dropped to one knee and pulled Hannah gently toward her.

  "Look at me, Hannah. I know you're mad at me and that's okay. You're just eight years old and you're tired and hurt and scared. Your mother and sister are gone, you've flown across the country twice in two days, and you feel like everything's just awful. I'd be angry, too. So if you look at me and I see the mad in your eyes, it won't make me get mad back because I understand why it's there. Later maybe we can be friends. Right now it's really okay to show how you feel."