Jimmy looks around the trailer, grateful that he straightened up before going out to meet Cali. The CD ends and he gets up and puts on Johnny Cash. When he sits back down he takes her hand and holds it. The stress and strain of his day-to-day are gone. To remain suspended in the night quiet of the trailer listening to the old school honkytonk music just looking into Cali’s brown eyes.
“You’re staring at me,” she says.
“Let’s make a mistake.”
He kisses her and she kisses him back and then he gets up and they dance a little to Johnny Cash, Jimmy’s hand on her waist, her palm on his shoulder, neither one of them saying anything, cheeks touching, sensing each other’s warm breath. They kiss again and Cali’s hands drift up and she slowly unbuttons the front of his shirt, one button, then another and Jimmy reaches under her blouse and unhooks her bra. He runs his fingers up the small of her back and around the soft curve of her hip and over her breast and she unzips him and takes him in her hand and then she says You got clean sheets? He tells her yes he does and keeping her hand where it is she leads him into the bedroom.
WEDNESDAY, OCTOBER 31
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Before he gets to work in the morning Hard has to do some campaign business so he is out of bed earlier than usual. In the bathroom he locks the door. Dressed in cotton pajama bottoms, he turns toward the mirror. Twists his head to the side and delicately removes the bandage from his neck. Probes the distinctive tine marks of the still fresh wound with two fingers. Cursing Nadine once more under his breath, he shaves, taking extra care around the perforations. Then he showers and applies a fresh bandage.
He has distributed lawn signs to constituents around the district and has been disappointed by how few he has seen. This morning he intends to spend an hour knocking on doors and asking people whether they’d mind if he places Mary Swain signs in their yards. Vonda Jean is still pretending to be asleep when he walks into the kitchen.
Bane lays curled on his bed. Usually he is up scratching the door to go out but Hard assumes the unseasonable heat has tired him out. He pours himself a bowl of corn flakes, drowns them in milk and sits down at the kitchen table to read the morning paper. Out of habit, he scans the front page for some mention of himself. Nothing today. That will change on Election Day, he thinks with satisfaction.
At 7:30, the sun is already blaring. Halfway through his cereal, he looks over at Bane. The dog hasn’t moved. He can sleep all day. Right now Hard wants some company. He calls the dog’s name. Bane does not stir. Again, he calls, “Bane!” Louder this time.
Hard places the newspaper on the table and kneels by the dog. He rests his palm on the dog’s chest. Instead of the steady rhythm of breathing, Hard feels a lifeless mass. Bane does not appear to have a pulse. He shakes the sleek body but the dog does not move. Places his ear to the ribcage. Nothing. Hard quickly gathers the dog up, a hundred and twenty pounds of flesh, sinew and bone, throws him over his shoulder, carries him out of the house and places him gently in the bed of his truck, jumps in the drivers seat, puts the cherry on top, and drives a hundred miles an hour to the animal hospital, dialing the vet’s home number on his cell phone and telling the sleeping woman to meet him at her office right now, Bane Marvin does not appear to be breathing.
It takes nearly twenty coronary-inducing minutes to get to the Yucca Valley office of Dr. Amber Foyle, an attractive young woman with whom Hard would have been happy to replace Vonda Jean. But that is not on his mind this morning. Bane is his favorite member of the household and the dog’s life must be saved at all costs.
Dr. Foyle has already unlocked the door and is waiting for their arrival. Hard comes dashing in like he’s running an Olympic event, the large dog limp in his gentle arms. The vet tells him to place Bane on the examination table and he instantly obliges. The stethoscope is pressed to the dog’s chest. Hard waits, his breath shallow and agitated. He cannot conceive of what could have happened. Bane is six years old and, at least until this morning, in perfect health. Hard has heard of puppies dropping dead but never an adult dog. They had taken a brief walk before dinner but nothing unusual had occurred.
Increasingly nervous, Hard watches as Dr. Foyle examines the inert animal. After nearly five minutes, she tells him Bane is dead. He has to sit down when he hears this. Although rough and insensate with humans, Hard genuinely loves his dog. Other than cheating on his wife, one of his few pleasures is taking Bane on long walks in the twilight, after the heat has died down, or in the dawn before the sun has lit the horizon. He doesn’t need a leash, the dog walking along with him easy as water.
After a respectful pause, the vet asks Hard if he wants her to run some tests on Bane to learn what exactly has transpired, and he readily accedes. Hard is so downhearted by the morning’s events, he neglects his plan for the lawn signs and instead drives straight to headquarters.
Every morning during the campaign, Randall and Maxon have breakfast at Rick’s Restaurant and Bakery on North Palm Canyon Drive, a see-and-be-seen biscuits and eggs place popular with tourists and locals. Someone they know is always dining at a nearby table and the atmosphere is friendly and convivial. They review the day’s schedule, share man gossip, and make plans to take over the world. It was during a conversation at Rick’s seven years ago that Randall looked up from his breakfast fajita and told Maxon he was going to run for Congress. On the way out the door there are always hands to shake, backs to slap, and a day’s worth of good feelings to be shared. These are all the reasons they are not there this Wednesday morning but have gone instead to the Viceroy, an elegant small hotel a block north of downtown.
They are the only two diners eating breakfast in the pool area adjacent to the dining room. Randall is seated on a white leather banquette, Maxon opposite him. The pool deck is lined with yellow and white striped chaise longues, each with a rolled white towel at its foot. White flowers spill out of Roman urns mounted on plinths. Ornamental birdcages hang from trees. The Hispanic waiter arrives with their food—fruit salad for Randall, huevos rancheros for Maxon—and departs with a murmur and a nod. Maxon shakes a bottle of hot sauce over his plate.
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her I’d take care of it,” Randall says.
His fruit plate remains untouched. Randall has not had much of an appetite since his wife’s revelation the previous evening. He didn’t sleep well and spent the dark hours envisioning different iterations of his career’s end. Right now he’s hoping the coffee will kick start his jangled system. Maxon glances around to make sure no one is within earshot. They’re still on the early side of the breakfast rush.
Quietly, Maxon asks, “Is Kendra gay?”
“Hell, I don’t know, and I don’t really care.” This is expressed with a bravado that belies Randall’s true attitude since no man so insouciantly accepts a wife’s adulterous behavior unless it is for his personal delectation. Randall hopes Maxon does not see through his facade.
“Hey, brother, I’m just asking. Are we going to be dealing with a divorce?”
“No one’s getting divorced.”
“Well, that’s good. But you might want to think about leaving her after the campaign. No one gives a rat’s ass about divorce. We just don’t want it going on when you’re running for re-election. It can get messy.”
“This flippin tennis teacher implies she has eyeball evidence of some kind of lesbo love session and I don’t care how gay this town is, there’s enough retirees and ex-military going to be freaked out that their Congressman’s wife’s gone to the dark side to cost me the motherflippin election.” Randall looks both ways, his features pinched in distress. Then he locks eyes with Maxon, says, “I mean, how’s it going to look if one minute I’m hosting the Purity Ball and the next minute I’m married to a gay?”
This is not the kind of conversation Maxon was expecting to have when he left his perfectly restored mid-century modern rental in the Twin Palms neighborhood twenty minutes ago. A development lik
e this right before Election Day is seriously bad juju. Not that it would have been better had the indiscretion come to light earlier. But he does not want it fresh in a constituent’s mind as she reaches for the lever.
As a young buck Maxon had harbored his own ambitions as a candidate, but his inadequate hair, squint, and pasty Scandinavian complexion are a hard sell in an era when the visual aspect of campaigning makes an attractive physical presentation a pre-requisite for high office. Voters don’t want any leader. They want leaders who look like they play leaders on television, leaders like Randall. Maxon gazes in the mirror and sees a guy who sells menswear at Nordstrom’s.
He was working as a political consultant in Sacramento when State Senator Randall Duke let it be known that he was looking for someone to run his first Congressional campaign. Maxon leapt at the chance. He had studied the masters of electoral hardball, those bare-knuckled, meretricious practitioners of evil for hire, and was keen to put the lessons to use on a broader playing field.
Six years ago, when Randall first ran for the United States House of Representatives, the seat was open because the incumbent had died in office. His opponent was a woman named Karen Niles. An attorney at a public interest firm who had successfully sued Riverside County to force them to provide better housing for the homeless, she was married with a young son. Her husband was a surgeon. Any political party would have been hard pressed to find a better candidate and she was viewed as a sure thing against Randall Duke who was thought to be callow and a little dim. But Maxon was able to turn a spotlight on a vacation to Egypt she’d taken with a woman friend ten years earlier and spin it into an Islamic-sympathizing fantasia that most observers believe caused her to lose the election.
“I do everything an incumbent’s supposed to do. The Latino outreach, the domestic violence march, I’m leading the Desert AIDS walk for Pete’s sake. And if anybody takes that the wrong way, I’m hosting a dang Purity Ball. I’m working on saving the Salton Sea, I’m a friend to the veterans, I visit every senior center in a hundred mile radius. And I don’t just visit the seniors, Maxon, I visit the flippin gay seniors! Who else in Congress gives a crap about the gay seniors?”
“The gay seniors have great affection for you.”
The two men are silent for a moment. A party of four young male golfers wanders in and sits at a nearby table. Oblivious to Randall and Maxon, they’re talking loudly of tee times and stock picks.
“Point is, I’ve been delivering the goods to my constituents for three motherflippin terms. I fly back from Washington every other week to listen to their problems. I do everything right and now I’m in this situation? With Mary Swain gaining on me and a lesbian snake lying in the tall grass waiting to sink her teeth into my foot?” Randall spears a pineapple cube and shoves it into his mouth.
“Somebody comes at you like this, you give them some money and they’re right back with their hand out again,” Maxon says. He notices one of the golfers is looking their way. The man says something to his tablemates and they laugh.
“There aren’t a lot of clean options,” Randall says.
“There aren’t any clean ones. You want me to talk to her?”
“What’s that going to do?” Randall asks, a streak of helplessness in his voice. Perhaps this really is the end. All political lives have an arc. Randall has always assumed his would be a long one, but it’s an unpredictable business.
“Who is she?”
Randall takes a small spiral notepad and a cheap ballpoint pen out of his pocket, flips the pad open and jots something down. He tears the page out and slides it across the table. Maxon glances at the paper, the name written on it. There’s also a place of business, a tanning salon. He’s invested years of his career, prime years, in the Randall Duke brand and he won’t see the brand damaged. No more House seat means no run for the Senate, no run for the Governorship. No good options. Play this wrong and Randall Duke winds up operating a couple of Baskin-Robbins franchises in Arizona, Maxon making sundaes. Maxon’s not going to let this happen.
“I’ll talk to her,” he says, folding the paper and sliding it into his shirt pocket.
“How’re your huevos?” Randall asks.
“They’re all right. Probably should have got the fruit salad, though. Don’t need the carbs.” Then he gets the joke, smirks. “Don’t worry about my huevos,” Maxon says. He digs into his pocket and removes his wallet.
“I’ll get breakfast,” Randall says.
“I know,” Maxon says. He opens his wallet and shows Randall a gold law enforcement badge.
“What the flip is that?”
“Remember when you spoke to the California Law Enforcement Association? I got them to make me an honorary deputy.”
“You son of a gun.” Randall is still laughing about it when the waiter brings the check.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Cali drove home to her apartment in Yucaipa at three in the morning and caught a few hours of sleep. Then she got up, showered and headed to work thinking about whether she’d ask Hard to be reassigned today. He had her working on crimes against property cases: residential and commercial burglaries, all types of theft, check crimes, credit card forgery, embezzlement, scams and vandalism. She was interested in crimes against persons: robbery, rape, adult and child sex offences, child abuse, runaways, missing persons, mental cases and, of course, homicide.
Especially homicide.
Something had happened between Cali and Hard shortly after she had joined the force, and it factored into how she dealt with him. What it was: Coming off a patrol shift, getting a drink at the water fountain in the hallway outside the squad room she felt a hand on her back rubbing in a north south motion then running a finger along her bra strap. She turned around ready to swing at whoever it was until she found herself looking into Hard’s face. He cocked his head and told her what fine things he was hearing from her superior officers. He said he’d like it if the two of them had a drink after work one evening and being a young officer she was flattered if a little wary. More than a few drinks were consumed and Hard got Cali into his truck where he tried to have sex. She thought she could get him to calm down with a handjob but when he still insisted on fucking her Cali smashed a forearm into his chin causing Hard to nearly bite his tongue off and drool blood for half an hour.
Why didn’t this talented and attractive young woman, this paragon of law enforcement not file a sexual harassment claim against her brutish superior when the sad facts were so clearly on her side? Although she would have been awarded a pile of money, her career would have been over. Not over as in ended but over in the sense that she never would have been granted admission to the male-controlled club whose members don’t look kindly on women who leave their colleagues twisting in litigious winds. She was looking at a future of bad assignments, marginalization and frustration. Being a deeply practical woman, Cali made a clear-eyed assessment of the situation. Her conclusion: Boo-hoo, lets move on.
After realizing that she was not going to file a sexual harassment claim Hard has kept a cautious distance.
Cali stopped at Dunkin’ Donuts and bought a dozen glazed. The box is open on Hard Marvin’s desk, Cali not above working the pastry angle, whatever it takes. Shameless. She doesn’t care, sips takeout coffee. Hard’s container—milk and two sugars, she checked with his secretary—is untouched, the cover still on. The office is large and the chief sits behind his clean oak desk, the only decoration a mass-produced Frederick Remington sculpture of a cowboy riding a bucking bronco. On the wall behind the desk is a framed oil portrait of General George S. Patton. Cali sits across from Hard in a high-backed stained wood chair.
“You want to catch a homicide?”
“I’m ready.”
“After being a detective less than two months.”
Hard doesn’t want to deal with this woman right now. His dog just died, after all, and this is a mourning period. All he wants to do is stare out the window and feel the pain wash over him as he
cogitates on the unsatisfactory nature of human relationships and the superiority of dogs. And here’s this woman sitting across from him whining about how she’s not getting the kind of assignments she likes. He never would have promoted her if the Town Supervisor hadn’t informed him that the detective squad could no longer be run as a boys’ club and there wouldn’t have been an opening if Jimmy Duke hadn’t fucked up the way he had.
Cali makes sure she maintains eye contact with her boss. She thinks of him as an old guy, nearly fifty, and no feminist. Senses he likes her well enough but would prefer it if she were the department secretary. His big feet are up on his desk and he chews a golf tee, which he takes out of his mouth to sip from a can of Buck Rhino energy drink. Probably not touching the coffee she brought just to spite her. Hard sticks the tee back between his teeth after he swallows.
“You’re doing decent work, Cali. You and Arnaldo made a good bust the other day.”
“I don’t want to keep doing the undercover stuff.”
“You getting nervous?”
“Hell, no. I’m not nervous. I want a change is all.”
“Get a new hairdo.”
He smiles to let her know he’s kidding around, as if that makes it all right. She has to act like it’s funny, show she can take a joke when all she wants is to lay him out. It’s a girl’s life. Then she says: “I want to catch a homicide. Like I said.”
He looks at her like she just tickled his chin, sort of a half grin, an expression that says what the hell are you doing and why don’t you quit it? Now he’s diddling with the laptop on his desk, staring at a list of names.
“Rojas, Torres, Reyes, Jimenez.” Looks up at Cali.
She says, “Yeah?” Like what are you getting at?
Angry Buddhist (9781609458867) Page 11
