“Not scared as much as frustrated. Unfinished business can be like coitus interruptus,” I said. “You know how that sets you on edge, don’t you, Flint?”
“The things that come out of your mouth…”
I have long legs, a family trait, and I was stretching them to get through the cavelike lobby and out the door. Flint had no trouble keeping up. When we were outside, in the rain again, I turned to him.
“Get me in to see Aleda Weston,” I said.
“I’ll try. I’ll make some calls in the morning.”
“Tonight, Flint. I want to talk to Aleda tonight.”
“Jesus, lady. Aren’t you worn out? I’ll buy you a drink, take you back to Emily’s apartment. You get some sleep. In the morning, when normal channels are open, I’ll see what I can do.”
“Never mind,” I said. We stood on the sidewalk in front of the hotel, rain pelting the awning over our heads. The only way I can describe how I felt is itchy, itchy inside somewhere I couldn’t quite reach. But I had to keep trying.
I looked sideways at Flint. “Tell me where they’re taking Aleda tonight and I’ll handle things myself.”
“Be my guest,” he challenged. “She’s being booked into the Metro Detention Center, the new federal lockup on Alameda. Think you can talk your way in?”
“I think it would be a lot easier if I was with a badge.”
He slapped his hand over his heart and grinned at me, “She admits she needs me.”
“Jesus Christ, Flint, it wasn’t a proposal.”
“Ssh,” he said. “Don’t spoil the moment.”
I turned and started walking again so he wouldn’t see me laugh.
Flint was beginning to grow on me. In my line of work, I’ve met a fair share of policemen, a lot of them suits like Flint. Generally, I don’t like them very much. They wear a tough veneer, armor I suppose, to protect the soft spots they manage to hang on to in spite of the shit they see during the ordinary course of their work. Emotional armor may be necessary to survive the job until retirement, but it makes them hard to get close to, too slick to get a solid grip on.
Outwardly, Flint was like his comrades: nosy, cautious, bossy, reactionary, opinionated. He made the proper tough-guy faces, held the right postures, but I suspected that all the time he was asking his questions, doing his cop thing, he was loving every minute. His hair had gone white awfully early in life, but he seemed otherwise unmarked by his dealings with the city’s underside.
Flint hadn’t let the valet park his city car when we arrived. So we had to retrace the long hike into the depths of the hotel garage to fetch it. When the car was in sight, he bumped my arm.
“Say it,” he said. “Say you need me.”
“If that’s all it takes, okay. I need you, Flint. I need you to get me in to Aleda.”
“Okay, we’ll give it a try,” he said. “But first you tell me why the hurry.”
“I don’t know. There just is.”
“There just is?” he said. “How do I write that in the report?”
“You write this, ‘Detective Michael Flint, serial number What’s your serial number?”
“One-five-nine-nine-one.”
“You can fill that in later,” I said. “You write, ‘Detective Michael Flint, after an exhaustive investigation, determined that Aleda Weston, located in the custody of United States Federal Marshals at the Los Angeles Metropolitan Detention Center, was a material witness in the shooting of Emily Duchamps.”
“Did we just make another detour into Oz? Aleda was in an airplane somewhere over the breadbasket when Emily was shot.”
“I bet you breakfast that if you check long-distance telephone records, you’ll find some nice long chats between Emily’s number and the general neighborhood of Aleda’s most recent digs.”
“Think so?”
“I just bet on it, didn’t I?”
“If you’re so damned smart, tell me what they were talking about.”
“The timing of this little reunion. Aleda and Emily were very close until Aleda went underground. I know they worked this all out together.”
He thought about it, frowning. “You can’t be thinking that Emily expected Aleda to come and pour the coffee. They had to know she would be in custody for a while.”
I took his arm. “Let’s just ask her, shall we?”
Still he hesitated. “Do you eat big breakfasts?”
“Huge,” I said. “This one will really cost you.”
“We’ll see.” He unlocked the car. “Vamanos.”
The car was cold when we got in. The windshield steamed up as soon as Flint turned on the heater. Flint smeared it around a little with his coat sleeve. I couldn’t see anything out of my side. He strained forward as he drove us up out of the garage, trying not to hit any concrete pillars. He was awfully quiet again. He had turned down his dispatch radio so that we heard only a female-voiced hum over the sound of the engine and of tires squealing on the slick driveway. I kicked off my shoes and put my damp feet against the heater vents and tried to sort things out.
I had planned to stop by the hospital to see Emily. When I called Dr. Song before leaving Max’s room, he told me my parents had arrived. My father, he said, was sedated and sleeping in the doctors’ lounge. The nurses had set up a cot in Em’s room for my mother. If, by some chance, Mother had managed to fall asleep, my arrival would awaken her. She had to be exhausted. I wanted to see her, but, as Dr. Song had warned me, we were in for a long haul. Mom and Dad needed their rest. I could wait until morning. I prayed Emily held on that long.
The Metropolitan Detention Center sits next to the Holly-wood Freeway, a cruel, transient view for the prisoners locked inside.
Flint parked in what he called city parking—a red zone in front of the building. He hung the microphone of his police radio over his rearview mirror to fend off parking cops.
The streets were deserted—downtown L.A. dies when the commuters go home for the night. Other than a few dark shapes sleeping in protected recesses around the entrance, there was no one around. Not even a news van in sight.
The detention center building is new. It looks more like a postmodern hotel than a prison. At least on the outside. The reception area beyond the front door is hard and polished and austere beyond any need.
There were two federal corrections officers manning the front desk. Flint handed his police photo ID to the older officer, a thin, balding man in his mid-thirties.
“Detective Flint,” he said. “LAPD. Major Crimes Section.”
“Officer Clark. Guest registration,” the officer said, handing back Flint’s ID. “I can recommend the accommodations, sir, but we don’t offer room service.”
Flint laughed politely. “Quiet night, huh?”
“Up here it is,” Clark said. By now they were both leaning companionably on the desk. I might as well have been invisible. “New guest has things hopping in the booking area.”
“Would that be Aleda Weston?”
Clark nodded. “Our star boarder.”
“Is she processed in?”
“They’re still at it. You want to talk to her, you’ll have to wait.
“Who’s the assigned federal attorney?”
“Ricardo Valenti.”
“Richie Valenti?” Flint raised his brows. “Is he in the building?”
“Believe he is. You know Richie?”
“Hell yes.” Flint grinned. “We been tangling for a long time.” Clark grinned his own grin and leaned closer to Flint, expectant. “Yeah?”
“He ever tell you about Senora Magdalena?”
“He never did.” Clark turned to a second officer, an Opie-esque, freckle-faced redhead. “Hey, Ernie, Detective Flint here was on the Magdalena thing with Richie Valenti.”
“Yeah?” Ernie joined them. “How’d that go down?”
“Classic lawyer fuckup,” Flint said. “Can’t blame Richie, though. You ever see Senora Magdalena?”
“Nice, huh?”
&n
bsp; “Beautiful. Little bitty thing. Couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. And tight all over. You know the type?”
Flint’s listeners, lifted from their nightwatch boredom, pressed closer, waiting for more. I stood back a little, an interloper, and watched Flint work. He was good, with subtle hand gestures and facial expressions that said more than his words. This was male bonding at its richest.
“Beautiful little thing,” Flint repeated. “And young. In this country we would have called her marriage statutory rape. How she hooked up with Senor Magdalena I can’t figure. Except he was rich. What was he, Colombian trade consul or something? Anyway, he was older than shit and just about as ugly. I think Richie got a look at him and started to feel sorry for the linda senora. Stupid ass, huh?”
“Typical lawyer,” Clark chuckled. “Dumb shit.”
Flint cast me a sidelong leer. “Guess we shouldn’t talk about a pending federal case in front of a potential witness, right?” The two listeners swiveled to look at me.
“Hell,” I said. “Don’t let me interrupt a good story.”
Turning from me, Flint gestured Clark and Ernie closer. “Help me out on a technicality here. Is it considered a conflict of interest if, when a federal case comes to trial, the prosecuting attorney and the chief defense witness are both still taking penicillin for something they picked up together in an interrogation room?”
They all laughed, a little too hard, I thought.
“So,” Flint said. “Is Richie still in the building?”
“I can call down. What’s your business?”
Flint nodded toward me. “Senora Magdalena’s sister wants to see him.”
“No shit?”
“Nah. Miz MacGowen is Aleda Weston’s half-sister. I was told to bring her over here to see the attorney in charge. Guess that’s Richie, huh?”
“Come on through,” Clark said. “Ernie’ll escort you back. Say hi to Richie for me.”
“I’ll do that,” Flint said.
Ernie was still chuckling as he opened a side door for us. Flint waited for me to go ahead of him.
“You’re a good liar,” I whispered as I walked past.
“Standard operating bullshit.”
“With you, it’s a gift.”
He laughed.
“I can’t wait to meet Richie Valenti,” I said.
Flint winked. “Neither can I.”
I stopped in my tracks and laughed. Guffawed may be a better description. Ernie seemed to think I was fairly strange. The way I looked, baggy sweats and spike heels, and Flint’s allusion to me during his Richie story, may have given him a certain impression. I didn’t give a damn: he was handing us visitor’s passes. Ernie clipped a plastic pass to Flint’s lapel, but stood at arm’s length to hand me mine.
“Through here, folks,” Ernie said, and led us into a back passageway. “Down at the end of the hall.”
I noticed the noise first, a stark contrast to the mausoleum-like quiet of the front lobby. A dozen or more people hustled about or sloped against the walls in various stages of boredom. The mob looked something like the crowd that was keeping vigil outside Emily’s hospital room: clusters of people in wilted business suits, a perimeter marked by half a dozen uniformed officers. Most of the activity centered around a gridded window, a cage, set in the wall at the end.
On the far side of the cage, I could see the bowed, graying head of Aleda Weston.
I felt a sudden rush of emotion when I recognized her, equal parts nostalgic tingle and elation for having pulled this off. I gently punched Flint’s padded shoulder. “We’re in.”
“Getting into a lockup is never the problem,” he said. “It’s getting out again.”
“I’ll worry about that later. That’s Aleda. How close can we get to her?”
“You can just walk up and talk to her.”
“Really?”
“Try it.”
We were being watched, the newcomers. It was too late and too damp outside for anyone to look freshly starched, but I was certainly a contrast to the suits and ties that characterized the group. I didn’t want to stand out, have all ears on me when I got my chance at Aleda. I stayed close to Flint, using his respect-able mien as cover as we walked toward the end of the passageway.
“Maggot?” A primly suited woman with wide hips and a frizzy perm detached from the knot closest to the cage and bustled toward us. “Maggot, is that you, honey?”
It took me a moment, but I recognized her: Fay Cohen, one of Emily’s lawyers from the old days. Fay had been the last word in fire-eating radical attorneys during the sixties. A Red Diaper, Emily labeled her, the offspring of Depression-era Leftist labor organizers. She had sucked in the tenets of violent protest at her mother’s breast.
I had seen the scope of her fury in court, in defense of Emily and Emily’s ex-husband. I had once, as a kid, literally trembled with fear in her presence. Now she appeared merely grandmotherly, a soft, postmenopausal woman whose feet seemed to hurt.
I walked ahead to meet her. Fay reeked of cigarettes and coffee and failed deodorant.
“I knew I’d be seeing you soon,” she said. “But I didn’t expect it to be here.”
“I came to talk to Aleda,” I said.
“Impossible.”
“You’ve tried?”
She smirked. “I represent Aleda. No one talks to her.”
“Until when?”
“Until I say so.”
“You know about Emily?” I asked.
“Of course. I’m sorry, honey. It’s a tough break.”
“I need Aleda’s help.”
“Help for you maybe, but not for Aleda. Aleda has been as good as off the planet for twenty-two years. What do you have to talk about?”
“The good old days.”
“Fat chance, baby girl. Aleda is here on a twenty-two-year-old fugitive warrant, and the charge is manslaughter. The last thing I’m going to let her talk about is the old days. Not to you, not to anybody.”
She was holding my arm so tightly it hurt. I tried to shake her free, but she was very tenacious. Flint was beside me, running interference with people who surged around us trying to get Fay’s ear, or mine, or to fill their own. I didn’t know who they all were.
“What a zoo,” Flint said.
“But the maneaters are all locked up for the night.” The voice came from close behind me and I wheeled on it. My stomach sank when I saw who was there: Lester Rowland, FBI. “Maggie, how you doin’?”
“I’ve been better,” I said.
Lester was J. Edgar Hoover-era FBI, one of the boss’s pets—a shark with a political agenda. For years he had tailed Emily, tapped her telephones, bugged her bedroom, rifled her files, and otherwise harassed her. Getting her and her colleagues behind bars had been his mission, his obsession. Again and again, Emily and Fay had foiled him, though, using his own infractions against the laws of due process to scuttle his evidence. In my parents’ house, Lester Rowland had been the anti-Christ.
“What are you doing here?” I asked. “You must be retired by now.”
“This is my show,” Rowland said. “I brought Aleda in.”
“Pissant,” Fay spat.
“Nice way to talk, Fay.” Lester feigned offense. “You going to let our Maggie talk to Aleda? See if she needs anything?”
“Aleda has everything she needs,” Fay fumed. “No one talks to her. That means you, Herr Rowland. I know your tactics. You even look at Aleda when I’m not present and I’ll have your hairy Gestapo balls for breakfast.”
“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Rowland laughed.
“Fuck you.” Fay stomped away, swearing under her breath.
“Same old Fay, huh, Maggie?” I didn’t like the way Rowland kept looking at me, or his making familiar. This was the first time I had personally spoken to him. It was an experience I could have made it through the rest of my life without. Lucas had talked about the taint of radicalism clinging to Rod. Lester carried a d
ifferent stain, one of backroom beatings, blackmail, and ugly covert manipulations—all under the color of authority. I saw in his face something dark and vaguely obscene. Certainly the way he looked at me, a visual strip search, gave a certain weight to that impression.
Lester’s grin showed a lot of good dental work. “You still swimmin’, Maggie?”
“When I get a chance.”
“You sure were cute. Bet you don’t remember when I came to watch you swim.”
I remembered Emily with an FBI escort at my high school swim meet. I had only had eyes for Emily that day, and hadn’t paid much attention to the two feds sitting behind her. Now I felt squeamish just thinking of this big, leering man watching me then, seeing me as a young teenager in my little Speedo swimsuit.
He made me think about the story Flint had told the desk officers, about young Senora Magdalena. Even if Flint had made it all up, their wiseass laughter and their assumptions about the woman had been real enough. Okay, so I had laughed, too. It still made me feel very uncomfortable. The smug look that crossed Rowland’s face when he said I was “cute” told volumes. I knew he and his partner had had nasty things to say about my adolescent body. I felt violated in retrospect.
“Don’t you remember me, Maggie?” Rowland asked again.
I shrugged. “You all looked the same to me.”
A guard inside with Aleda looked out at the crowd. “Say good-night, Gracie,” he said loudly as he began to roll a steel shutter over the cage opening.
“What’s he doing?” I asked Flint.
“Aleda’s being booked. She wants a little privacy when they take her clothes away.”
We were six feet from the cage and I called out, “Aleda!”
She looked up, confused at first. I did stand out from the suits, so she spotted me quickly. A smile lifted the deep creases in her face. I had always been the pesty little sister Emily’s friends barely tolerated. For that reason, I didn’t expect Aleda to be particularly happy to see me. But she obviously was. She moved to the metal grid and laced her fingers through it to block the shutter.
“Excuse me,” the guard said and tried to move her aside. “Maggot,” Aleda cried. “Thank God, you’ve come.”
Flint held Fay back and I ran. I reached for the grid and put my fingers over Aleda’s.
Telling Lies Page 7
