Caught Red-Handed

by Jan Burke

  The ambulance pulled up, so Frank held his questions for the time being.

  * * *

  Later, after Mouse’s injuries had been photographed and X-rayed, her wounds cleaned and treated, she was released by the hospital. Frank drove her back to headquarters, where Bear brought a meal to her while Frank showered and changed clothes.

  “Much better,” Bear said, when he rejoined them. “Let’s take Mouse back home.”

  As they started to walk out, Darryl Cross walked in. He came to a sudden, startled halt, then continued walking into the building.

  “What was that all about?” Bear asked.

  Mouse was shaking.

  “Mouse?” Frank asked.

  “Get me out of here,” she said.

  When they were in the parked patrol car, she said, “I mean it, Bear. Please! Please get me out of here.”

  “What’s going on, Mouse?”

  “That guy—the one that just walked in? He’s gonna make sure Alvin gets out. I can’t stay in Bakersfield, Bear. You know what Alvin will do to me.”

  “You know him?” Bear asked. “The guy who just walked in?”

  “I don’t know his name,” she said, but Frank thought she was lying about that.

  “Where’d you meet him?”

  “Where do I meet anybody? At a curb.”

  “Can’t help you if you bullshit me,” Bear said.

  She was silent for so long that Frank turned around to make sure she hadn’t passed out. The doctors had said she had a mild concussion.

  But she was awake, arms crossed over her stomach. She was shivering. He got out of the car and opened the trunk. He retrieved a blanket—an item he was beginning to see he’d use more often than his gun. He opened the back door farthest from her and placed it on the seat, then closed the door. He got back in the front seat.

  She pulled the blanket around her, looked at him, and said, “Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome.”

  As if this small kindness and polite exchange had decided something for her, she said, looking at Frank and not Bear, “We all know who he is, and who his father is. He’s got a place out in the trailer park. Alvin says Darryl’s dad doesn’t know about it, but Alvin lies all the time. So I don’t know about that. I just know he’s got this place next to that red trailer we talked about.”

  Frank forced himself not to look at Bear, prayed Bear would just let her talk. He needn’t have worried.

  “Alvin says, ‘I’m taking you there, you show him a good time, he just likes knowing that he’s doing something his old man doesn’t know about.’ So he took me out there.”

  She looked toward the building, pulled the blanket closer around her. “Some men—you know, some men don’t really want sex. Well, they want sex, but it’s not about having fun or feeling good. It’s all about the power. They get mean. He’s mean.”

  “He hurt you?”

  “Nothing that hasn’t happen to me before. I’m just saying, you’re going to work with him, you should know he’s mean.”

  “Thanks,” Frank said, although he already knew this about Darryl.

  “It scared him to see me with you two, and when mean people get scared, they get even meaner. You know what I’m saying, right, Bear?”

  “I do, Mouse. See it every day.”

  Frank hoped Darryl didn’t come back out of the building anytime soon, because he didn’t trust himself to keep hold of his temper if the SOC showed his face.

  Then he thought of his dad, who had once told him, “The best cop is a cop who can stay calm in a situation that practically begs him to go apeshit on somebody. That’s the real test of respect for the uniform.”

  He calmed down.

  Bear said to Mouse, “How long have you been clean?”

  “Two weeks,” she said. “Not long. I don’t know if I’m going to be able to stay clean. Not with all this shit happening.” She paused. “How’d you know?”

  “No fresh tracks, no doctors telling me that your head injury couldn’t be evaluated because you were high. And—well, you’re a different person when you’re clean. More yourself. Alvin didn’t like it?”

  “No. He didn’t like it at all.”

  Bear put the car in gear. “I must have a hole in my head,” he murmured, and drove off the lot.

  “Where are you taking me?”

  “You want to be safe?”

  “Yes.”

  “What if I told you that right now you are the most powerful person in Bakersfield?”

  “I’d say you do have a hole in your head. Stop clowning, Bear.”

  “I’m not. Let me see what I can do.”

  He drove to a gas station at the edge of town, told Frank to stay in the car, gathered up a roll of dimes, got out, and walked over to a pay phone.

  When he got back to the car, he seemed amused.

  “What’s so funny?” Frank asked.

  “I’ll tell you in a second.” He turned to Mouse. “Just talked to Detective Mattson. He and Tucker are going to meet with you and a prosecutor who’s the head of a task force that has been working on an investigation into Chief Cross. Cross is about to lose his job. And being unemployed will be the least of his problems.”

  “What does that have to do with me?”

  “Just tell them what you told us, and they’ll put it together with some other little facts they have about Darryl and his dad.” He hesitated, then said, “When all that’s over, I have a friend who will give you a ride to Las Piernas. She has family there and is headed back there for a visit tomorrow. She’ll take you to a place that’s run by another friend of mine down there, someone nobody else here is connected to. It’s a place where runaways can stay, so you’ll be older than most of them, but she said she’d welcome having someone there who’s between her age and theirs to listen to them, help them out. If you can’t stay clean while you’re there, then I’ll find another situation for you, but you have to promise me you’ll at least try to stay out of trouble while you are under her roof.”

  “Does she know I’m a junkie and a hooker?”

  “Ex-junkie, and I’m hoping, ex-hooker. Up to you, Mouse. But she’s not afraid of your history, if that’s what’s worrying you.”

  “What is she, some kind of nun?”

  He laughed. “No. Her name is Althea Fremont. Her son ran away from home and joined a biker gang. She can’t do much for him, so she decided she’d give other runaways a safe place to stay while they sort things out.”

  “I could have used a place like that a couple of years ago.”

  “I knew you’d see why it’s important. What do you say?”

  “She really wants me to be there?”

  “Really.”

  Frank saw a look of longing come over her face.

  “What if I fuck up, Bear?”

  “Not the end of the world. Humans fuck up all the time. You’re a survivor, Mouse. And if you don’t like it there, give me a call. I’ll drive down there personally and help you work something else out.” He reached into his roll of dimes and held up a pair of them. “Before you leave, I’ll give you my number and a couple of emergency dimes. You lose the dimes, you can call collect.”

  She stared out the windows, tears rolling down her face. “Okay,” she whispered. Then louder, she said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

  As they drove toward the place where they were meeting the detectives and the prosecutor, she said, “You never told Frank what was so funny after you got off the pay phone.”

  Bear laughed. “The person who is giving you the ride to Las Piernas is Irene Kelly. She’s a young reporter, new here in town.”

  “He’s been trying to get me to meet her,” Frank said.

  “So far, he’s been cleverly sabotaging my efforts. Anyway, she’s on the police beat, and she won’t b
e able to keep hold of this story—too big for a new reporter, so it’s already been taken from her.”

  “You told a reporter about this?” Frank asked, appalled.

  “Hell, no. No need to. She heard the call for the meat wagon on the scanner and went out to the trailer park, where she got very little of the story until she talked to one Mrs. Erkstrom.”

  Frank groaned.

  “Before anything was on the television news,” Bear went on, “she was over at the Starlight Arms, the snazzy apartment building O’Keefe used to manage. She goes door-to-door, good little news hound that she is, breaking the news to the tenants and asking about O’Keefe, when all of a sudden she hits pay dirt.”

  “I’m afraid to ask,” Frank said.

  “One woman turns pale as polar ice and says, ‘Oh my God! I never thought this day would come. Wait here.’ And she goes back into the apartment and comes back with a shoebox full of cassette tapes. She says, ‘Donnie told me that if he ever died under mysterious circumstances, I was supposed to turn these over to the newspaper. I thought he was being overly dramatic, but I humored him.’”

  “And?”

  “Chief used to keep a mistress at the Starlight Arms. He used her place to meet some other—‘associates,’ let’s say. Mistress used to drive Donnie nuts, and he knew she wanted him out of the job. So Donnie bugged her place, and thought at first of using the recordings as a threat—until he figured out what kind of people he’d be threatening. So he decided instead to have this lady who was fond of him keep the tapes as a kind of insurance, in case something happened to him. Tapes may not be admissible in court, since the taping couldn’t have been legal, but they will still cause him problems. Plus, they included one Donnie made himself, saying he was afraid Chief Cross would have him killed for what he knew about him.”

  “The Bakersfield Californian has them now?” Frank asked.

  “Contacted the DA’s office about them almost immediately.”

  “Almost?”

  “Made copies first, of course.”

  “Wow. I could almost feel sorry for your reporter friend. Would have been a big story for her.”

  “You feel bad about what happened to the big case you worked on today?”

  “No. I’m not ready for a homicide case. I’d rather see the bad guy get what’s coming to him.”

  “I have a feeling Irene would understand that exactly.”

  * * *

  Darryl Cross said that the death of O’Keefe was accidental. He liked O’Keefe, who had set him up at the trailer park and kept his identity a secret, so that he could have a place to have a little fun without his dad watching his every move. He’d been cleaning a gun when it discharged, and the stray bullet had gone through the wall of his trailer and into O’Keefe’s. When he saw that it had killed O’Keefe, he panicked and staged a suicide scene.

  No one believed him.

  Which might not have been fair, Frank thought, but the privilege of being the SOC was backfiring on Darryl in a big way. Frank wasn’t going to waste sympathy on him.

  “You wanted to kick his ass that night, didn’t you?” Bear asked when they heard of his arrest.

  “So hard he’d have to find a new way to shit.”

  “What made you change your mind?”

  “Something my dad once said to me.”

  “About staying calm in the face of provocation?”

  “Something like that.”

  * * *

  Justice and its wheels ground on, slow and fine.

  They were grinding the chief’s privileged life down to dust.

  Alvin, without his protector to save him, was also looking at a long stretch in prison.

  Mouse had mailed the dimes back to Bear, with a note thanking him. She was happy at the Casa de Esperanza, the place Mrs. Fremont owned.

  * * *

  One night, at the conclusion of a long shift of what seemed like an endless walk down a hallway of human misery, Bear again invited Frank to meet his friend the reporter for dinner. Frank thanked him, but told him he had something planned.

  “What?”

  Frank just smiled and said he’d see him the next day.

  * * *

  He was starting to be curious about the reporter, but he hadn’t lied about having plans. He drove to an apartment building, where Len Meadows, the person he was meeting for a late dinner at a Denny’s, was waiting at the curb.

  Maybe someone else would have shunned the company of a kid who had puked all over his patrol car, but the remorse Len had later shown for his actions caught Frank’s attention.

  So with the gratitude and approval of Len’s overwhelmed mom, he met with Len, and suggested that instead of staging drunken rampages at sporting events, it might be better if once in a while the two of them went out for a burger and Len talked to him about whatever was on his mind. Len could have turned the offer down, but he didn’t. He later told Frank that he felt as if he couldn’t go any lower than he had the night of the game.

  Frank had seen plenty of examples of going lower, but kept that to himself. Len was a smart kid. Frank was going to encourage him to do more with his life than live it as a self-destructive protest against his father.

  So even though he had decided that one day soon he was going to have to give in to Bear’s pressure and meet the reporter, today wasn’t that day—he had made a promise to Len, and he kept such promises.

  He kept them because he owed something to Brian Harriman, a man who cared about his children and the example he set for them.

  And that, Frank decided, made him one of the most privileged of men.

  THE LOVESEAT

  The shovel half-rang like a muted bell as it struck the metal. Leila Anderson sighed and stopped digging, wiping the back of her leather glove across her forehead. She was hot and tired, but determined to finish planting this last section of her garden.

  She turned from the corner where she had been working and looked across the big backyard. It should have been our garden, our yard, our house, she thought to herself. Sam should be here with me.

  But he wasn’t. Samuel Barrington had left her for a girl of twenty-two, a girl who made mooning cow’s eyes at the silly man. Before Cow Eyes—Marietta Hinchley—came into the picture, Leila had known exactly how things were going to be. She knew that after four years of being engaged, she and Sam would finally marry; knew that they would move out of the apartment they had shared and into a lovely house; knew that she would keep getting promotions at the investment firm she worked for; knew that Sam would continue to be able to pursue his doctorate in mathematics, because she, Leila, would support them, just as she always had. And most certainly, back in those golden days, Leila had known what was expected of her. Her ability to predict and her own predictability. That was Leila’s life.

  But Sam had surprised her. She hadn’t ever been fond of surprises, and this one did nothing to endear them to her. “You’re so reasonable, Leila,” Sam had said that day. “I know you’ll understand.” Leila would always be his friend, Sam had told her, but in Marietta, he had found passion.

  Passion! Didn’t he know she, Leila, was capable of passion? Of course she had always been controlled around him. She had eschewed the sentimental, been the “reasonable” woman he had come to rely on. As logical as his beloved mathematics. The habit of it was ingrained in her so deeply, that even as he was telling her of his unfaithfulness, she had reacted just as she had known Sam would want her to react, exactly in the way he had come to depend on her to react: reasoned, calm, controlled. But that was on the outside. Inside, she raged. Raged passionately.

  So used to pleasing Sam, though, she was determined not to let him know how wounded her pride was. She reasoned that at that particular moment, the only psychological weapon she had to defend herself with was her dignity, and she used it like a knife.

&
nbsp; She had met Marietta the next day. Sam, oblivious to the tension between the two women, had begun his “let’s all be friends” campaign without delay. A beautiful, slim, athletic, young woman, Marietta had tried hard to upset Leila’s equanimity. She made allusions to Leila’s age, which was not more than eight years above her own; she hinted that Leila was out of shape, which was untrue. Leila was not the athlete that Marietta was, but she was no slouch. Sam had seemed a little displeased with Marietta’s lack of grace. And Leila knew that while Sam had been relieved and grateful that she had not fallen apart, Marietta had been hoping for a tantrum, a scene. Marietta, Leila had seen in a moment, was a bitch. Leila had smiled, certain that Sam would more than do his penance.

  He would do his penance, but at that moment he was too smitten with Marietta to realize what he had let himself in for. He saw Marietta as a lonely child, dependent on him for guidance. He later tried to apologize to Leila for Marietta’s bad behavior, saying that Marietta was alone in the world, without family to guide her. Sam thought himself capable of teaching her manners. Leila thought it was the biggest joke Sam had ever played on himself, but said nothing.

  Hoping that living well was indeed the best revenge, she went on with her life. She had chosen this house on her own and bought it. The house had been built in the 1920s, and she loved its polished wooden floors and arched windows and tall ceilings. The day after her furniture was moved in, she went to work on the garden with all of the passion she had leftover from the end of her relationship with Sam. She dug up old, neglected flower beds and planted them with bright, beautiful blossoms: impatiens and fuchsia and pansies and geraniums; a wild, unpredictable mix of anything that would give her eye a moment’s pleasure. She planted pink jasmine and roses along the high stone fence that surrounded the big yard. She was glad of the privacy that fence gave her yard, her little oasis of color and fragrance.

  She had saved this corner for last. A week ago, while pruning back the poorly tended honeysuckle that had overgrown this corner, she discovered something that had made her cry. Beneath the vines she had found something made of stone, broken in two parts. When she had realized it was a loveseat, it had suddenly come to symbolize her broken romance with Sam, and for the first time since the day he had told her of Marietta, she had cried. Four months of bottled pain and humiliation burst from her like champagne from an uncorked bottle, and cold, predictable, passionless Leila wept in her garden.