Good to the Last Kiss

by Ronald Tierney

  She didn’t respond.

  ‘I thought you were homicide, Inspector. This is sex crimes or General Works, right?’

  Gratelli shrugged noncommittally. He wasn’t in the mood to explain anything – let alone the serial homicide connection – to Seidman. He’d know sooner or later. But like the press, it was better later.

  ‘I want to talk with her,’ he said to Seidman in a tone that couldn’t be mistaken for anything but official.

  There was an awkward moment when it appeared Seidman would insist on staying for the conversation. But Gratelli’s disapproving look must have changed the lawyer’s mind. Seidman got up slowly and went to the door.

  ‘If there’s anything I can help you with, let me know.’

  ‘You and I probably need to have a little chat too,’ Gratelli said.

  ‘Inspector Gratelli?’ Seidman said at the door.

  Gratelli turned.

  ‘She didn’t know, I think.’

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘What happened to her. The woman told her.’

  ‘What did happen to her?’ Gratelli asked, wanting to know what the assistant D.A. knew.

  ‘That she’d been raped,’ Seidman said, a puzzled look on his face.

  ‘Was she?’ Gratelli asked.

  ‘Wasn’t she?’

  Gratelli shrugged.

  ‘What in the hell do you mean?’ Earl said, staring across the table at the little red-headed lawyer who unburdened his tattered briefcase of a half dozen manila folders.

  ‘What I said,’ the guy replied. ‘They won’t do your bail.’

  ‘You talked with them?’

  ‘Yes, I talked with them.’

  ‘What did they say? Exactly.’ Earl asked, pushing the anger down. He’d already screwed up by letting his temper get the best of him. That’s why he was sitting here.

  The lawyer rolled his eyes. ‘Exactly, your father said . . .’

  ‘My fucking stepfather!’

  ‘Your fucking stepfather said . . . exactly, he said: “Let the little asshole rot.”’

  ‘Was she there? My mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  ‘She said exactly nothing.’

  Earl looked away, then up. His eyes locked on a corner where the walls met the ceiling.

  ‘That guy’s gonna live isn’t he?’

  ‘Appears so.’

  ‘You don’t like me, do you?’

  ‘I have to defend you. I don’t have to like you. Now, tell me again, who got out of the car first?’

  Inspector Mickey McClellan sat at the Formica topped table in the Stockton Street noodle joint when Gratelli came in. Chinatown used to be McClellan’s beat when he first came on the force and he hung out there whenever he had the chance.

  ‘So what’d she say?’ Mickey asked.

  ‘Nothin’.’ Gratelli sat down. Though it would make his bladder work overtime for a few hours, the police officer ordered tea. The coffee was lousy there.

  ‘Couldn’t, wouldn’t, what?’

  ‘Dunno,’ Gratelli replied. There was a long pause while Mickey slurped some noodles off the chopsticks. ‘Maybe in shock. Maybe brain damage,’ Gratelli continued. ‘Mouth wired shut, vacant stare and I doubt if she could hold a pen even if she knew what the hell was going on.’

  ‘A zombie,’ Mickey said. The Inspector’s insensitivity was legendary. He called blacks ‘jungle bunnies’ and gays, ‘those little winged creatures.’ Women were ‘babes’ unless they possessed the qualities he imagined all female police officers had. Then they were members of the ‘lesbo squad.’

  Gratelli took very little notice of Mickey’s apparent prejudices. The balding, potbellied Inspector McClellan held everyone at the same level of disgust. It was equal opportunity bigotry. His prejudice was universal. Vietnam, years of vice, drugs and homicide brought him into contact with the baser elements of every category of humankind. The only difference between Mickey and a good percentage of the other cops who felt a kind of generalized hate as personal defense, is that he never bothered putting on a public face.

  His hate, however, was no longer full of passion, no longer malevolent. Calling Chinese ‘slants’ was a way to keep people at a distance, keeping them as lifeless objects so he wouldn’t puke or have nightmares when he saw some Asian kid floating in the bay.

  ‘We get a victim who could tell us something and the lights are out on the top floor,’ McClellan said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Gratelli said looking out of the corner window seeing the stream of Chinese faces flowing by.

  ‘Bateman’s a P.I., right?’ Mickey asked. ‘Maybe she made some nasty enemies if I can guess what you’re thinking.’

  ‘That wasn’t what I was thinking.’

  ‘You don’t seem to buy into the idea that this Bateman gal gets a serial number like the others. Copycat maybe?’ McClellan asked.

  ‘Dunno. She was beat up. None of the others were.’

  ‘Same guy,’ McClellan said. ‘Something goes wrong. Maybe she freaks out. Asshole loses his nerve, beats her up, but not so fucked up he leaves without the tattoo.’

  ‘What makes you think so?’

  ‘I don’t know. Same kind of chick.’

  ‘Julia Bateman is not the same kind of ‘chick’,’ Gratelli said. ‘She’s not poor. She’s not helpless . . .’

  ‘She is now . . .’

  ‘She’s not that young.’

  ‘Well, Bateman was within the drive time. Two hours from the city. Old or young, beat up or not, she’s got the mark. Nobody knows about the mark.’

  ‘A lot of people know about the mark.’

  ‘Who? Nothin’ in the papers, nothin’ on TV about the mark,’ Mickey said, deftly trapping some noodles in the grip of the two little wooden sticks.

  ‘Thirteen sets of cops, fourteen sets of coroners, maybe even ambulance drivers and who knows who else. And no doubt a couple of ambitious prosecutors.’

  ‘So you’re sayin’ we got two cases, not one.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you sayin’?’

  ‘Nothin’.’

  ‘Well, here’s the skinny. They want us to stay on the Bateman thing.’ Mickey used the word ‘they’ for anything that came down from the Lieutenant or higher. For him, everybody above him was some vast ‘they’ bureaucracy. Some gray machine. He’d accepted them as he did everybody else, putting them in a specific category of the general category – ‘asshole’ – and keeping them at arm’s length.

  ‘What about the task force?’ Gratelli asked.

  ‘If you look at the organization chart on this thing we are connected to those folks by a little dotted line. We talk to them. They talk to us. But you and me bub, we are by ourselves from now on. Just Bateman and only Bateman so help us God.’ He smiled. ‘That suits me.’

  ‘You’re not saying that like you mean it.’

  ‘Yeah, well, what the fuck?’

  ‘I don’t like it either.’

  ‘It’s like we’re not doing the job,’ McClellan said. ‘I’d like to know who the fuck would’ve done it better. You ever heard of this? Takin’ us out like this? Shit.’

  ‘Political,’ Gratelli said. ‘Too hot. There’ll be another news conference.’

  McClellan was quiet, except for the slurping sound the noodles made as they disappeared between his lips. An incredibly mild explosion, Gratelli thought. He was taking it too well. McClellan’s life wasn’t about acceptance, but that seemed to be what he was doing, gradually slipping from nearly uncontrollable anger to indifference.

  ‘So what do we do now?’ Gratelli asked, sipping his tea.

  ‘I think we take in a little baseball or take a little drive up to Gurneville. Your choice, kiddo.’

  ‘Julia?’

  She didn’t hear Thaddeus Maldeaux come. Nor did she hear him speak. A nurse had taken two dozen cream colored French tulips from him. She would find a vase and return. He pulled a chair up, beside her bed. />
  ‘I don’t know if you can hear me,’ he said touching her hand. ‘I should have gone with you. Or better yet, you should have run away with me.’

  He waited. The nurse came back in, put the vase on the rollaway table. ‘They’re beautiful,’ she said and left again.

  ‘It’s tough,’ Maldeaux said softly. ‘The world is a strange place, Julia. Sometimes it is so beautiful it takes your breath away. Sometimes it is so horrid . . .’ he said, voice trailing off. He looked at her. There wasn’t much to recognize. Swollen, blue, distorted face. ‘And you never know when something dark and foreign and deadly will strike. You know, under the sea there are wondrous things we’ve never seen, most of us. Colors and shapes of living things that would amaze us, take us away from our normal daily lives. There is a turtle I saw that looks like a leaf. A harmless leaf. But it is hungry. Like all of us, we do what we must to survive. And so a fish goes by, thinking it is a beautiful day in its vast watery neighborhood and the fish does not see what it is who lies in wait.’

  He leaned over the bed, whispered in her ear.

  ‘You’ll survive, Julia. Then you need someone who can help, who can tell the difference between turtles and leaves.’

  SIX

  It was all so real. Julia Bateman could smell home – the place where she grew up. There was a crispness in the morning air. It carried the scent of the sun burning dew off the grass. She stood behind her aunt’s white frame farmhouse.

  She was on the highway now, the rolling blacktop that rose and fell between the Amish farms. They waved to her. The women in their long dresses waved as if they knew her, loved her. The men too, in their dark clothes, waved, welcomed her.

  She could feel the breeze in her hair. She was gliding across the ribbon of highway in the sun. How was she moving? She didn’t know. She looked down. There, in her blue Miata convertible. She didn’t have that car in Iowa. Then, as if by magic, the landscape changed. She was on the highway along the ocean now.

  She’d done this before. Repeatedly. Even asleep, she knew it would be the same as it was before. Driving up Highway One along the California coast. It was all too familiar now. The carefree feeling she had was giving way now to a sense of anxiety. Into the pines. Getting darker. She was frightened. There was her Aunt’s house, only it wasn’t white anymore. It was dark and dingy looking. What was it doing there, half hidden, lurking in the trees?

  Julia Bateman was in the house. There were pictures. Her sister, her father. She didn’t have a sister. It was a picture of Julia. A picture that was supposed to be her mother; but it wasn’t. It was Julia Bateman staring back through the dusty glass. In the hall now. A long hall. Thin, wind blown drapery drifted in like ghosts from doorways she hadn’t known were there. Something was going to happen there. She knew it. It was terrible. She couldn’t look. She put her hands over her eyes.

  ‘Oh God, no!’

  She smelled something like ammonia. Julia Bateman opened her eyes to see her legs stretched out under a white blanket. Beside her were machines with tubes that stretched out and into her. She remembered now. She was in the hospital. She took small comfort in the knowledge that she was alive.

  ‘We thought we lost you yesterday.’

  Julia looked over by the window. It was Paul Chang.

  ‘You’re going to be OK, Jules.’ He came to her, sat on the bed. ‘I’d hug you but I think it might hurt right now.’ He patted her hand. ‘Don’t try to talk. We’ll have plenty of time for that.’

  A woman came in. About Julia’s age. A sturdy woman with dark, short-cropped hair.

  ‘Jules?’ she said, edging to the bed. She seemed almost frightened and the emotion seemed not to suit her.

  Julia’s eyes seemed to show recognition for a moment. Then the eyes went dull again.

  ‘Hey Sammie, how ya doin’?’ Paul said quietly.

  ‘Paul.’ She responded warmly, but her eyes were on the patient.

  ‘How’s she doin’?’

  The answer was in the silence.

  Too much time to think. Earl unbuttoned his jail shirt and looked down at his chest, hoping they wouldn’t keep him in too long because he’d be missing his weights. It took less time to lose muscle than it took to gain it.

  So his lawyer didn’t like him. Stand in line, he thought. If there were things about Earl Falwell people didn’t like, Earl was the first to learn them. Hell, his dad didn’t like him well enough to stick around or to contact him once he left. And that pissed his mother off, because, if the truth be known, she sure as hell wished the old man would have taken Earl with him.

  His stepfather wanted Earl out of the house the moment the toad moved in.

  People didn’t like him when he was a little, pimply mouse of a kid. Now that he was strong, they didn’t like him any better. Now they were scared of him. He could see it in their eyes.

  Outside, in the world, he could fool people sometimes. When he first met them, he could act all nice and shit, like he cared about what was going on in their lives. Give them something.

  That’s how he did it. That’s how he got the girls to go with him. Meet them at the mall, maybe the beach at San Gregorio or somewhere on the streets in San Francisco. Down around Turk Street they were kinda scuzzy, but they weren’t all that bad when they were young. They’d talk to him. He was always shy with women. Came in handy. Made them feel comfortable. Then he’d find out what they’re into. Rock bands mostly. Then he’d say he had these tickets to this or another concert. Whatever was in town or coming to town, some group they’d die to see.

  Only he didn’t have the tickets with him, he’d tell them. He’d have to go get them. That would always work. And they’d go with him. He’d get them out somewhere. Always somewhere different. Hell, he didn’t even remember where a couple of them happened. He remembered it would be someplace in the middle of nowhere. And that’d be it.

  What he really wanted was a woman, not some girl who barely had her pubes; but the young ones were easier. He didn’t feel so awkward around them. And they trusted him. Most of the time, they didn’t even see it coming.

  McClelland and Gratelli met with Judge Wharton the next morning to get the warrant to search Julia Bateman’s San Francisco residence. However they decided to go to the cabin in the woods first.

  McClellan drove. Gratelli, this time, rode shotgun, the unmarked Taurus making them look like a couple of hardware conventioneers in a rental.

  They drove without conversation, up Highway 101, choosing speed over the beautiful but tortuously slow Highway One. They bypassed Mill Valley, Novato and Petaluma before having to exit at Cotati, where still another bypass would get them around thriving and trendy Sebastopol.

  Gratelli would have preferred the scenic route. McClellan seemed immune to anything aesthetic. Once out of San Francisco, it didn’t matter that much to Gratelli. The sky was a cloudless, hazeless blue and the sun through the glass warmed him, enticed him to relax. He allowed Puccini’s ‘Un bel di’ to creep in and sweep out the debris that littered his mind. It was as good a way as any to spend a Friday afternoon, a fine way indeed to reduce the tension before gliding into a weekend.

  Gurneville, the closest town to the crime scene, was one dot on the map beyond Forestville. It wasn’t until then that McClellan spoke.

  ‘You know where I can find a cheap apartment?’

  ‘The Tenderloin,’ Gratelli offered as a joke.

  ‘Too expensive. I checked.’

  ‘Who’s interested?’

  ‘Me,’ McClellan said, eyes still on the road.

  ‘Yeah, why is that?’

  McClellan didn’t answer. He didn’t need to. Gratelli regretted asking. He had pieced together the signs. It was the breakup of a twenty-five-year marriage. That many years was a near record in the police department, where male officers, and now female officers, accumulated multiple spouses. But when a marriage lasted beyond the second decade, there was another dangerous time. When the kids left. When they were on their o
wn. Nothing to hold the shaky partnership together. The years of late hours, mediocre pay, lack of communication, pent-up anger, disillusionment took its toll on the most well-intentioned, devoted families.

  Even now, McClellan couldn’t talk about it.

  ‘Why in the hell would that dink want to move way up here? Christ, a woman alone in a cabin in the boonies, she’s asking for trouble.’

  ‘Un bel di’ was irretrievable. Fitting for Julia Bateman, Gratelli thought. The aria from Madama Butterfly was the song of innocence and the prelude to the grim, ironic realities of life and death. And Gratelli’s quiet afternoon escape was over. They neared the cabin.

  As Inspector Mickey McClellan went with cops from Santa Rosa and Gurneville inside Julia Bateman’s cabin, Gratelli wandered the outside perimeter of her property. There wasn’t much of it. The cabin itself was set into the hill, the front jutting out, leaving only a modest yard in front before it was cut off by the gravel road.

  Even so, the cabin was almost invisible from the road, hidden by pines of various heights which canopied a wilderness of ferns and other greenery below he couldn’t identify. If the lights were on inside, then perhaps someone could detect human existence. Otherwise it was doubtful, especially doubtful in the dark. The drive might give it away, though it was narrow and was slightly overgrown from disuse.

  An automobile parked in the drive might call attention to itself by reflecting a headlight. However, Julia Bateman’s blue Miata was parked around the curve and in a space under the house. Had it been moved since the crime?

  The doors and windows to the cabin had not been jimmied. There were no footprints, no broken twigs or squashed plants. No sign anyone had tried to peek in the windows. If the brush had been beaten down, it wouldn’t have surprised him. In fact, he was surprised that the local police hadn’t tromped around the grounds.

  How did the rapist get in? Not likely through the windows and not likely through either door unless they were left unlocked or Julia Bateman had let him or them in herself. Possible. She hadn’t yet spoken a word on the subject. What was also possible was a climb up the hill to the roof. Stones had been embedded along one side of the incline toward the back of the cabin to inhibit erosion.