The Safety Expert

by Doug Richardson

  Ben continued on, briefly laying out the rest of it. Josie’s research on the name. Woody Bell. Ben’s visit to Stew Raymo’s construction site. Even his harebrained handshake theory and the embarrassed feelings that followed. Lastly, Ben finished with Woody’s email and Stewart Raymo’s picture. He withdrew three folded pages from his shirt pocket. These were copies of the email, Stew Raymo’s mug shot, and his criminal record.

  Gonzo took the papers, stood, then circled around to a nearby landscaping light. She had to crouch to read the printout.

  “There were never any arrests?”

  “No,” said Ben, clipped.

  “Leads?” she asked. “You must’ve been in touch with the detectives.”

  “No fingerprints. No witnesses.”

  Once again, the lights were out in Ben’s world.

  Ben continued, “You know? You spend twelve, thirteen years getting over something horrible. Building a new life. New career. Wonderful family. Of course, the past doesn’t go away. It fades a little more every day. Eventually, it starts to feel like nothing more than a bad dream. I mean, some if it’s work. Therapists. Grief relief. Perspective, life picture. You work at it, and yeah, you’ve moved on. You survived.”

  Ben felt his muscles tense and watched both his hands fold into fists.

  “At least you think you have. Then this shit happens. A pinprick and you find out it’s all a fuckin’ bubble. I’m right back there. Might as well have been yesterday—”

  “This doesn’t mean it’s him.”

  Gonzo had finished browsing the printouts. She seated herself at the edge of Ben’s recliner and calmly touched his knee.

  “I mean, this guy,” she continued. “This builder guy whose hand you shook. Yeah. He was a bad guy. Maybe he still is. But none of this—not what some dead con said on a CD—or this rap sheet—none of it means this Stew Raymo was the one who did the thing.”

  “The thing?” said Ben, slightly incredulous. “You mean murdered, right? My family?”

  “Yes. Murdered,” she apologized. “What happened to you is truly horrible. Unimaginable—”

  “It could be him.”

  “Sure,” she conceded. “It could be. But without any kind of proof or lead or—”

  “So you won’t help me?”

  Gonzo’s eyes closed. Her lips pressed together as Ben’s new master plan had become clear. He hadn’t come to her house with sex on his mind. Nor had his visit been a confessional to the Madonna police officer. Ben wanted her to run the dogs on Stew Raymo, the ex-con-turned-general-contractor.

  “It’s not even my division—”

  “You know people,” pressed Ben. “You can ask around.”

  “I can,” she relented quickly, only because she had another tack. But not yet. “I can ask. I can pull files. I can see if anything matches up. You deserve that much.”

  Gonzo hooked a gentle finger under his chin.

  “But first, Ben, I need you to look at me.”

  Ben’s entire face was wet from crying.

  “In the likelihood that there is no proof. No evidence or connection to your tragedy. What then? What will you do then?”

  In Ben’s eyes, barely illuminated by the moon’s ambience and a single pool light, Gonzo could still see hope. A hope that the old pain that haunted him would return to its ancient hole and politely shut the door behind itself.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t know at all.”

  “Go home to Alex. Go home to your wonderful family who loves you and needs you. Okay?”

  Gonzo gave Ben an affirmative nod.

  “You’ll check it out?” Ben wanted a promise.

  “I will check it out.”

  Gonzo walked Ben to the curb. They hugged under a streetlamp, holding each other for longer than either felt was appropriate. It was in that moment that Gonzo realized she had wanted to sleep with Ben that night. And would have if he had made any sort of advance. Earlier, she might have been able to resist him on principle. But she was a goner now, emotionally sucked into his nightmare. She wanted to do something more than mother his aching soul. She was willing to do just about anything that would leave Ben a little lighter. Even something as fleeting as sex.

  But Ben didn’t ask.

  Ben crawled into his Volvo, thanked her again, shut and mechanically locked the door, and drove away.

  The instant he was gone, Gonzo felt so damned alone. Strangely so. She stood in her suburban driveway and panned her view across the landscape of stucco houses, perfectly kept yards, all sparsely illuminated by streetlamps as tall as giraffes. She wondered what made her neighborhood so different from Ben’s in Culver City. How random was crime anyway? She questioned if her sleep was sometimes so sound that she might not hear a deadly intruder. For the first time in many months, she feared for the safety of herself and her little boy.

  Before returning to the comfort of her house, Gonzo made plans to sleep with her son that night. She would also make certain to keep her gun close. Very, very close.

  When Alex climbed into bed, she was both wondering and worried. Ben’s quick departure after dinner and bedtime stories had been both unlike him and so thinly excused that she didn’t quite know how to process it. He had informed Alex that he had left his BlackBerry over at Gonzo’s and was going back to get it. The fib would have sufficed if not for her distinct memory of Ben making one of his patented email checks at a stoplight during the short drive home. Alex didn’t know Gonzo all that well. Only that she was a single mom of the alpha variety. And the body language her husband and Gonzo had displayed earlier that afternoon was, if anything, suspicious.

  As Alex recounted their marriage, Ben had never cheated. Nor had he given her a solitary, doubt-worthy indication that he was so inclined. But Gonzo was an attractive enough woman. Ben was a man. And he had been gone for nearly four hours.

  So Alex lay awake until she heard the dog stir. Then came faint tones as Ben let himself in the front door. There was the jangle of keys, a visit to the downstairs bathroom. The toilet’s flushing. She could hear some brief puttering in the kitchen, a plastic cup filled with water, then Ben’s clockwise routine of checking the locks on every door and window. Lastly, there was his soft steps up the two-tiered staircase, the room-by-room check of the sleeping girls, then before he entered the master suite, the distinct high-pitched beeps as the alarm code was tapped out on the keypad.

  Then there was the dialogue in her head. She had been rehearsing it for the past two hours. Her questions first, then his possible answers, excuses, or lame rationales for not even calling. Her counterarguments. Then the big question.

  Are you screwing another woman?

  She couldn’t brave it, though. Before Ben crossed the threshold into the room, she had pulled the covers up and curled into a fetal ball. Stillness was what she craved. Conflict at this late an hour would be unwise. Alex thought maybe she would be able to smell it on him. The sex of another woman. But that chance was washed away when she heard Ben slipping into the bathroom, discreetly clicking the door shut, and turning on the shower.

  By the time Ben crawled in next to Alex, she was comfortably feigning sleep. She let him form his body to hers, kiss her bare shoulder, and whisper good night. It was his code. If she was awake and needed to chat, she would answer. If not, she would continue to log precious hours of slumber. When his left hand found hers, she let him clasp it. And as their wedding bands touched gold to gold, she prayed to Jesus it was a sign that he still indeed loved her.

  Sleep came quicker than anticipated. Alex didn’t wake until the alarm sounded at 6:00 A.M. Ben, she discovered, was already gone. Guilty as charged, she reckoned. Ashamed and unable to face his wife. All he had left was a scrap of paper Scotch-taped to the refrigerator door handle. The note was simple: Factory walk-thru in South Bay. I’ll call from the car. Love, B.

  “Mom!” Elyssa barked from the landing. “Nina’s wearing one of my t-shirts again!”

  “I swear,
she gave it to me!” defended Nina all the way from the top of the stairs.

  “I let you borrow it—ONCE!”

  “Let her borrow it again!” shouted Alex.

  “But what if I want to wear my shirt?”

  “She’s already dressed,” yelled Nina. “She’s not even wearing a t-shirt.”

  “BORROWED FOR THE LAST TIME, WASHED, RETURNED, AND THAT’S ALL I WANT TO HEAR ABOUT IT!” shouted Alex.

  The tone was final, and in Alex’s mind, ended the subject. She had enough weighing on her mind. Prepping lunches, delivering the girls to school before the bells rang, and then a long list of chores to accomplish. The painful subject of her cheating husband would have to simmer until she could dispose of it or it disappeared altogether. Alex had already lost one adulterer-of-a-husband-and-father to a heart attack. She sure as hell didn’t want to lose her current spouse to something as easy—not to mention common—as divorce.

  Stew woke up from the surgery with a headache. One astronomically bigger than the one he had started with. He had complained to the anesthesiologist that his head felt like a bucket of joint compound that had been left overnight. Neither doctor nor nurse was amused. Hell, figured Stew, they probably hadn’t a glimmer what joint compound was.

  At least I thought it was funny.

  He wished that he had pressed the headache issue and gotten some meds before they had wheeled him into the operating room.

  Nothing else hurt, even the left knee that had just been arthroscopically invaded. The pop he had heard the moment the silent-but-deadly Toyota Prius had hit him was the ripping of his ACL. Well-known to athletes and orthopedic surgeons, the Anterior Cruciate Ligament, Stew learned, is the knee’s major stabilizing component. The surgery was routine, mildly invasive and involved drilling holes in his knee in order to reattach the ligament.

  “Sounds pretty fuckin’ invasive to me,” Stew had said at the time of the pre-op exam.

  “You’re gonna be fine,” Pam hushed, before whispering in his ear, “and I think it’s a really bad idea to curse at the surgeon before he’s about to operate.”

  “Curse the fuckin’ hospital bill,” Stew replied.

  Stew and Pam had no formal health coverage. He wasn’t insured under his own over-bloated workmen’s comp policy. And the way the accident report had been written up by the LAPD, Stew was at fault for not crossing the street at a crosswalk. The Prius’ driver was instantly absolved of all liability. Adding insult to Stew’s injury, he was cited for jaywalking, a misdemeanor traffic ticket that would surely boost his car insurance rates.

  The post-operative suite at Burbank’s St. Joseph’s orthopedic unit was comfortably new, freshly painted in green and blue pastels. The room was divided in half. Six beds on one side, each curtained for privacy. The other side had a rudimentary nursing station with two sets of synthetic leather couches and chairs for waiting relatives. Stew couldn’t tell exactly how many other post-op patients were sharing the suite with him. There was, though, a large Korean family taking up most of the available seating. They were noisy, he thought. And why the hell couldn’t they speak English? Or even Spanish, for that matter? They were in America, goddammit!

  “Still got the headache,” Stew complained. He was louder this time, hoping a nurse would magically appear with a syringe of something chemically sweet to feed into his IV.

  “Doc says the knee pain’s what you’re gonna need to deal with,” said Pam.

  Stew twisted his thumping head to find Pam at his side. She was wearing black jeans and a matching turtleneck. By his best guess, he had been awake for at least fifteen minutes.

  “Don’t feel shit with the knee,” said Stew.

  Pam put her hand on his forehead. Her palm felt smooth and cool.

  “Got enough ice on your knee to cool a twelve pack.” She gestured to his left knee. It was splinted and bound in plastic bags looking to burst with ice. “‘For the swelling,’ they said.”

  “Maybe they should pack my head in ice. Fuckin’ kills.”

  “I’ll ask and see if there’s anything more they can do, okay?”

  Pam’s voice was soft. A blessing, he thought, considering the hammer in his head keeping time with pounding of his heart.

  Stew closed his eyes and tried to block out both the pain and nattering voices. He could feel the anesthetic swimming in him, blurring his mind and leaving the taste of galvanized metal in his mouth. He remembered a dream. Was it during the surgery or just some playback from the night he had jogged out for cigarettes? In the dream everybody was wearing bicycle helmets. And not just his crew. Everybody. Car drivers, pedestrians, supermarket checkers—even the schoolchildren. Why the hell schoolchildren? Strange.

  There was a crossing guard in the dream.

  Stew remembered the crossing guard as the inspector guy. Martin or Benjamin Whatshisname. There were about twenty school kids in the crosswalk, each and every last child identical in age, dress, and physical features. Girls, Stew remembered. Little schoolgirls in perfect plaid pinafores. Each child a carbon copy of the other, as if mechanically stamped out by machine in a schoolgirl uniform factory.

  And every child was wearing a bike helmet.

  Except the inspector, remembered Stew. That fuckin’ OSHA inspector! All he was wearing was a pair of vision protectors and a smug-assed smile.

  “Mr. Raymo?” asked the woman’s voice.

  At last, a nurse with drugs!

  Or so Stew thought in the microsecond before he pried his eyes open. Instead of a nurse, Stew discovered a tall, Hispanic woman. She appeared at the foot of the bed wearing a brown pantsuit. A shiny LAPD detective’s shield hung from her pocket.

  “Mr. Raymo? My name is Lydia Gonzalez,” said the detective. “May I?”

  With that, Gonzo pulled the curtain until she and Stew had privacy.

  Stew wanted to say something like, “If it’s about the accident, I’m going to protest the police report.” But experience had taught him that when it came to cops, the less said the better.

  “Sorry about the accident,” offered Gonzo. Though like from most cops, sorry didn’t sound so sorry.

  “Okay,” said Stew.

  “Docs say you should rehab okay.”

  Stew tried to raise his eyebrows, as if to ask why she was there. Only his head hurt so badly he couldn’t tell if his facial muscles were in tune with his intent.

  “What can I do you for?” croaked Stew.

  “Well...” Gonzo began her tale. “LAPD has a new computer system that crosschecks itself. So say, when a particular offender or witness we’re having trouble finding gets, say, a traffic violation, it pings back to the desk of the detective in need of assistance.”

  Gonzo wasn’t exactly lying. The LAPD had recently installed the new software. It was buggy, and so far, causing more technical mischief than crime-fighting shortcuts. But what Gonzo wasn’t going to admit to was that she had used the system in reverse. After pulling up Stewart Raymo’s arrest record, Gonzo had run the name and gotten pinged with the freshly minted accident report automatically sent from LAPD’s traffic division via fiber optics.

  “Almost get killed and they give me a goddamn ticket,” said Stew.

  “Good news for you is that you can fix that with a trip to traffic school,” said Gonzo, as bright and fake as a girl working the lost baggage desk at LAX.

  Stew wanted to tell her that she didn’t know shit. Sure the detective understood the basic precepts of traffic school; after eight hours of mind-dulling classroom instruction, citations for moving violations could be expunged from a driver’s record. What she wasn’t aware of were the qualifiers. The most important being that the driver must not have received a moving violation within eighteen months of his or her last visit to traffic school. Stew had attended a traffic school run by a local comedy club just a few months ago. He distinctly recalled that the actress/comedian/instructor was neither attractive nor funny.

  The post-op ward had turned so gravely quiet St
ew could hear faint chords from the piped in music. Where the hell were the Koreans? When Stew swiveled his gaze past Gonzo, he caught sight of a thick-looking detective covertly ushering the Korean clan out the double doors.

  Then came the question. Gonzo made sure to mentally record every tick, twitch, or bodily tell that Stew might unconsciously manifest.

  “We’re investigating an unsolved homicide...” started Gonzo.

  Stew’s eyes were sluggish. Gonzo had already clocked his pupils. They might not tell her a thing. She was more interested in his hands and chest. Would Stew breathe, heave, or curl his fingers towards his palms? Her tack wasn’t so much from her detective training, but from techniques taught to TSA employees when questioning suspicious airline passengers.

  “A triple murder from thirteen years ago.”

  The patient’s fingers twitched slightly, but nothing resembled a contractive move inward. Stew’s chest did heave involuntarily, pulling in an extra tankful of hospital air.

  “Was that a question?” asked Stew, his eyes fixed solidly on the lady cop.

  “Ring any bells?”

  “Thirteen years ago,” said Stew flatly. “That was before I got sober so I can’t say I remember much before then.”

  “Culver City—”

  “Why ask me?”

  “Home invasion robbery gone wrong,” pressed Gonzo. “Your sheet says you were in that business for a while.”

  “Only did time for burglary,” defended Stew. “But you knew that, right? Cuzza the fact you read my history.”

  Indeed, she did know that Stew had done two turns for robbery and another for third-degree assault. But those were merely pleas that his public defender had bargained. Stew’s initial indictments were for crimes more dangerous than breaking and entering an unoccupied home.

  “Well, your name came up. How’s that?”

  “Yeah? Am I some kind of suspect?”

  “Unsolved crime, Mr. Raymo. We thought you might be able to help.”

  Stew’s fingers began to stiffly waggle, as if warming up to play the piano.

  “Long time since my bad-boy days,” grumbled Stew. “’Cept for some traffic tickets—some IRS shit about back taxes—I’ve been a good citizen.”