‘What are these from?’ She took my right wrist and examined the half-dozen red welts rising like a chain of volcanoes up my arm.
‘Some guy burned me,’ I said, ‘with a cigarette.’
‘You were kidnapped, wasn’t that it?’
‘That was it.’
The scars served me well. At my trial, I stood and showed my arm to the jurors. I walked on murder one. After they saw the scars, they didn’t want to convict me, whether they believed I did it or not.
‘Into the bathroom for your A and T.’ She knew her way this time, opened the door and hooked her chin toward the toilet.
‘My what?’
‘Urine test. If you’ve done any drugs in the past week, they’ll pop up on the lab report.’
‘I was never arrested for doing drugs.’
‘It’s still a violation of your parole. You marry a doper, what do you expect? I warned you about this guy. They found enough coke on his body to choke a horse.’ She handed me the same paper cup I’d drunk out of minutes before.
‘You want me to pee into this?’
‘That’s right.’
‘And you’re going to stand there and watch me?’
A smile almost bent her rose-frost lips. She thought I was distressed because I’d been doing drugs. Maybe her job was so tough she had forgotten some people still like to have a little dignity. I peeled down my pants, squatted over the toilet and positioned the cup where I might catch something. For the past five years I’d peed in open view of the deputies but that didn’t lessen the humiliation.
‘You want to drink more water?’
‘Same cup again? No thanks.’
We waited. I stared at my feet, examined the ring in the bathtub, whistled through my teeth.
‘As long as it takes,’ she said.
‘I never saw Gabe do any drugs.’
‘Did you see him at all? That’s the question now. How much did he give you to marry him?’
‘I saw him a couple days before he was killed. We were getting back together again. That’s what I thought.’
‘Then where’s the ring?’ She pointed at my ring finger. ‘You didn’t live with him, you don’t wear his ring, how am I supposed to believe this was anything but a green card marriage?’
With my free hand I fished from beneath my shirt the circular pendant Gabe had given me. ‘He never gave me a ring. He gave me this. He wasn’t very conventional, you know?’ I had begun with the idea of committing the crime of marrying him for money and ended, what? In love with him? I didn’t know for sure that I didn’t. Maybe I did. Warmth gushed over my hand. My parole officer dipped her hand into her bag and pulled out a small plastic vial with a screw top. When I had enough to slosh around I held out the cup. She unscrewed the cap and set the vial on the sink edge.
‘You pour,’ she ordered.
I set the cup down next to the vial. My face burned. She did this for a living, I told myself, I shouldn’t feel shamed. I creased the cup, filled the vial, screwed on the top and washed it in soap and warm water. I said, ‘Look, maybe Gabe and I started off with one kind of relationship and ended with another. Maybe it was just something fun to do at first but then it got more serious. Does that make sense to you?’
She wrote the date, my name and parole number on a sticker and affixed it to the vial. ‘No. You either married him for money or you didn’t. A homicide detective leaned on me very hard this morning. He thinks you’re guilty of something, a green card marriage to start. He doesn’t want me to COP you. And if I find any evidence at all that you’ve lied to me, I won’t COP you.’
COP: Continued On Parole. Every parole officer had the power to recommend continued freedom or re-incarceration. She zipped my urine in her purse and didn’t wait to be shown the way out the door.
15
The address my ex-cellmate Rose had given me for the lawyer who had arranged the green card marriage connected to a two-storey faux French chateau in Hancock Park, the final outpost of wealth and privilege separating the Westside of Los Angeles from the melting pot of poverty to the east. Like most of the city’s enclaves for the moneyed, the residential streets were wide and quiet, save for the occasional whoosh of a Mercedes Benz or the distant buzz of Mexican gardeners mowing a lawn. Those lawns were, inevitably, like the houses themselves, big. In Hancock Park, anything under three thousand square feet was tear-down material. Water piped over the mountains from the Owens Valley coursed through automatic sprinklers and flowed into swimming pools, sustaining an almost tropical landscape rich in hibiscus and palm trees. The neighbourhood was lush in a way that only natural sun shining upon imported water, soil and plants tended by foreign labour can make a place.
The street sign in front of Harry Bendel’s mini-manse prohibited parking, as did the sign across from it and the one down from that. All the signs up and down the block carried the same warning. Parking anywhere on the street was illegal. If you needed to park on the street, you didn’t belong in the neighbourhood. I pulled into Harry’s half-circle brick drive. Like all old cars the Caddy leaked considerable oil. That was going to be Harry’s problem.
‘Jesus! Harry, it’s one of yours!’ The woman who shouted this to the cavernous hall behind the front door was thin and blonde and from the smooth sheen of her face it looked like the most serious problem she had was an overstocked refrigerator. Her clothes were Sunday casual but had that crisp, out-of-the-box look. Some people have a talent for that, mostly people with money. She shut the door in my face. Though of solid oak the door wasn’t strong enough to bar her voice. I heard the word ‘unhappy’, a long but muffled adjective preceding the word ‘clients’, and the emphatically voiced phrase, ‘in my house!’
The door snapped open to the pink face and massive body of a fifty-something man who started life big and got bigger eating too much steak and playing weekend golf. His shoulders stretched to both sides of the door frame and the size of his chest was prodigious though his belly had some time ago overwhelmed it. His body might have been out of shape but his voice wasn’t. ‘I don’t care what your problems are or how you got this address, never come to my house, ever. Are you absolutely clear on that?’ I’d never met someone whose natural speaking voice could be described as stentorian. His was.
‘One of your clients has been murdered,’ I said.
‘That is not a rare event. My clients are frequently murdered. That is the type of clientele I have. If you wish to discuss it with me, stop by my office tomorrow morning. I charge one hundred and fifty dollars an hour.’
I straight-armed the door before it closed. ‘The client is my husband, the man you set me up with, Gabriel Burns.’
‘The Englishman?’
‘I’m Nina Zero. I roomed with your client, Rose Selavy.’
He nodded with his entire body, leading with the shoulders, and darted a glance over his shoulder. He looked like a big kid worried about what might catch him from behind. ‘Go around to the side gate,’ he whispered. ‘I’ll meet you there.’
When I crossed the lawn in front of the living-room window they were going jaw to jaw beside the sofa. His voice boomed out, ‘She’s not a drug addict, she’s a widow for chrissake!’ The thin blonde didn’t flinch. I couldn’t grasp her exact phrasing but the substance of her snarl and yap was clear. Maybe her smooth face was like the crispness of her clothes, a given attribute of class and completely unconnected to her inner being.
‘Sorry I can’t let you inside,’ Harry apologized when he slid the bolt and opened the side gate. ‘My wife has a hard and fast rule: no clients allowed at home.’ He led me along the side of the house into the small piece of paradise found in the back yards of most California homeowners, though his was larger and considerably more paradisiacal than most. We sat in lawn chairs by the side of the pool, shaded by forty-foot palm trees. A hundred and fifty dollars an hour can buy a nice chunk of cloud. ‘Nobody’s contacted me about this,’ he said. ‘No reason they should, I suppose. I didn’t know
him that well, only performed the one small legal service which I suppose you know about.’ He was just filling space, waiting for me to begin.
‘They found him up in Lake Hollywood, beaten and stabbed to death.’ The words ground together in my gut like stones.
Harry leaned forward, elbows on knees, and clutched his hands together. Though out of shape, he moved with an athletic grace that made me think he could act quickly if needed. ‘Frankly, his death shocks me. Mr Burns wasn’t a typical client. He was a fun guy, the last of my clients I’d expect to catch the scythe.’
‘How was he not typical?’
‘He wasn’t a prostitute or a drug addict. Almost all of my cases involve so-called lifestyle crimes.’
‘Then I don’t get the connection, why he would come to you.’
Harry tilted back in his deck chair and gazed somewhere up among the palm trees. ‘I met him in a bar. I had to pull some overtime for a case on the docket the following morning. But I didn’t want to miss the 49er game – Monday Night Football you know – so I dropped by a local sports bar to catch the second half. Mr Burns was at the table next to me. He didn’t understand a damn thing about the game. Whenever anybody kicked the ball for any reason he’d shout, “That’s right, that’s the way to do it!”’ Harry’s smile faded with the realization that the memory was now his alone. He tilted the chair back down to all fours. ‘Damn. I’m sorry to hear he’s dead. But to be blunt, what do you care? His death absolves you of legal responsibility. Is that what you came to hear?’
‘No. I came for personal reasons. I came to find out…’ I couldn’t finish the sentence. The thought splintered to the hundred things I didn’t know, then crystallized into the one thing that perplexed me the most. ‘Why me? Out of the million and a half single women in this city why did you choose me to marry him?’ When his hands came up to calm me I realized I had stood and shouted at him. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘There’s just too many things about this I don’t understand.’ I knelt by the pool and splashed water on my face.
Harry watched as though he suddenly remembered I was an ex-con and could not be counted on to obey the laws of decorum or even those against physical violence. Or maybe he realized that if he didn’t placate me I could tell the police how Gabe and I met. I wasn’t an expert in the law but arranging a green card marriage had to be as illegal as participating in one.
‘I’m not an immigration lawyer,’ Harry admitted. ‘I advised him straight away to go to a specialist but he said he already had one of those and didn’t trust him. He wanted to go outside the circle. He was working on something he described as incendiary and feared an immigration lawyer could be extorted into betraying him.’
‘Didn’t that sound paranoid to you?’
‘Paranoia is when you’re snorting a dollar for every two dollars you deal and you think the FBI has planted a homing device up your ass. Mr Burns told me he’d been threatened with deportation, that somebody was investigating his life and asking a lot of questions that seemed directed to proving he was violating his work visa. Based on the type of photographs he took for a living, I’d say he was reasonably cautious, not paranoid.’
As it set, the sun reflected whole and clear at the deep end of the swimming pool. I didn’t wonder whether Gabe had lied to me, but how often he lied to me. When we were attacked in Las Vegas he said he hadn’t known the assailant but from what I had seen the assailant certainly knew him. A gust of wind rippled the surface of the pool. The sun bobbed precariously, split apart and warped to an orange smear. The image of a smile carved into flesh – the purplish line left on the skin by a stab wound – clicked before me like a slide. The man in Las Vegas had attacked us with a knife.
‘Would you like a glass of water?’ Harry knelt beside me, his hand on my shoulder.
I shook my head. The surface of the pool calmed to glass. The sun again became whole. Gabe hadn’t loved me enough to leave me with the burden of his death. ‘The cops told me they found coke on his body. Could he have been a dealer?’
‘No.’ His voice was terse and sure. ‘I’m around these people all the time. Mr Burns was not of that ilk.’
‘An addict?’
‘In certain professions every Angeleno under the age of fifty has sniffed coke. It’s a fact of life in the fast lane. He didn’t seem like a heavy user those few occasions we met. But anybody can be a recreational user and only a lab technician with a urine sample would know.’ He grunted and rubbed his right knee when he stood from the side of the pool and settled again in his deck chair. ‘Do you want to know what I think?’ The question was rhetorical. He was a lawyer, accustomed to giving advice and being paid well for it. ‘Cops like to exaggerate when interviewing someone they think might be connected to the case. They wanted to throw a scare into you, nothing more. As a parolee, you’d be suspected of everything from supplying him with the coke to killing him.’
If their objective was to frighten me, they succeeded. I understood the situation. When my urine sample came back negative, they’d look for another pretext to revoke my parole. I had no rights. The burden of proof was on me. ‘Rose told me Gabe was her cousin.’
A derisive Ha! boomed from his chest. ‘Rose was not Mr Burns’s cousin. Rose is my cousin.’
‘Why would she lie to me?’
‘She lies to everybody. Part of her charm. I asked her if she knew somebody. She named you. I do all her legal work pro bono. She lied to you because she owes me. When I mentioned you to Mr Burns he authorized me to go ahead and arrange it.’
‘A green card marriage to an ex-con. Why?’
‘He wasn’t sure he could trust the people he knew. If word got around that he was looking, there were people who would turn him in. He wanted to marry a perfect stranger. But in your case specifically, the deciding factor was probably the money.’
He watched me while he twisted a massive gold football ring around his index finger, as though he weighed the impact of what he was about to say.
‘What about the money?’
‘The other girl I suggested wanted five grand. You settled for two.’
16
A few blocks outside the boundary of Hancock Park the interior of my car lit the colour of blood. When I pulled to the curb and hooked the transmission into park I laughed at how my hands trembled. Five years in the joint and I still lost my nerve when a cop pulled me over. Reflected in the side view mirror the door of an unmarked police car opened into traffic and the immaculately pressed figure of Detective Harker stepped out. I was careful to keep my hands on the steering wheel. I didn’t want to give him an excuse to shoot me.
‘May I see your driver’s licence and registration, please?’
I handed the documents through the open window. ‘Next time you want to talk to me, why don’t you try my cell phone?’
He glanced at my licence for no more than a second. ‘Step out of the car.’
His partner waited on the curb, a club-sized flashlight gripped like a knife to rake across the back seat. He wore the same tan windbreaker and blue jeans from the night at Lake Hollywood. The man looked more shopkeeper than law; his waist extended beyond the plane of his shoulders so that in profile his body had the shape of a split pear. His close-cropped black hair thinned at the crown of a wide, freckled face that bore no identifiable expression except dispassion. I’d never seen a black face look so blank.
‘You were driving erratically.’ Harker walked me around the trunk of the Caddy. When he brushed aside the tail of his sport coat to rest his hand on his hip I noticed he still wore the detective badge on his belt. ‘How many drinks have you had this evening?’
‘You’re wasting your time. I haven’t had a drink in days.’
‘I distinctly smell alcohol on your breath. Close your eyes, lean your head back and touch the tip of your nose with your right index finger.’
I closed my eyes and did it, no sweat.
‘You just failed the field sobriety test. Under California Consent
Law you have no legal right to refuse a breath test.’
His partner opened the passenger door, crouched and worked the flashlight under the seat. The hairs of my forearm began to stand straight and pay attention. ‘If you plant any drugs in my car, the urine test will show I’m clean. You can explain that contradiction to the judge.’
Harker gripped my arm at the biceps and steered me on to the curb. ‘You didn’t have a beer this afternoon? All it takes is one open beverage container to ship your ass back to prison.’ He broke a disposable mouthpiece out of plastic, inserted it into a portable electronic box and held it up to my mouth. ‘Blow,’ he commanded. When the numbers read negative for alcohol his glance lifted over my shoulder and he slowly shook his head. I looked back. His partner nudged the passenger door shut. Had any alcohol registered on my breath, one of his pockets contained an open pint of something to get me busted, I had no doubt about that.
‘I’d like to talk to you about my husband’s murder.’
‘Your husband? A green card arrangement between a coke-head and a murderess doesn’t make a marriage.’
I dealt with a lot of misplaced aggression in prison. Soon enough you learn you can’t get into a fight with everybody who’s willing to fight with anybody. ‘Somebody attacked us with a knife. In Vegas.’
Harker pulled out a notebook. ‘Did you report it?’
It wasn’t a question, the way he asked it, more of a challenge. My parole agreement required me to register with the Vegas police department. I hadn’t. Gabe didn’t think it would be worth the trouble. We hadn’t reported anything. I said, ‘No.’
‘Were there any witnesses?’
‘Me. I saw it happen. The guy was early thirties, about five foot ten, dirty blonde hair.’
‘We’ll keep our eye out for him.’ Harker flipped his notebook shut without writing it down.
‘It’s a shame you can’t sue a cop for malpractice.’
Killing Paparazzi Page 8
