by Dianne Emley
They’d had a romantic relationship when they were both at the police academy. She’d been divorced and had been working as a citizen jailer in the Pasadena P.D. jail when she’d applied and was hired as an officer. She was soon at the Orange County Sheriff’s Academy, where the PPD sends many of its recruits. There she met Chad, who’d been hired by the O. C. Sheriff’s Department. They dated off and on after graduation. Conflicting schedules, geographic challenges, and Vining’s decision to stop dating until Emily was older had ended their romantic relationship. They hadn’t been in contact for a couple of years, but they’d kept tabs on each other through mutual friends.
As for Chad, after three years as an O. C. sheriff’s deputy, he decided that Orange County wasn’t big enough for him. He joined the Secret Service and worked in Criminal Investigations, on the trail of money counterfeiters, and then transferred to the White House, where he worked the presidential detail. He was injured while pursuing a homeless man who had aimed what looked like a handgun at the president. All the homeless man had been holding was a dead and rigid snake he kept as a sort of pet. After his injury, Chad was offered a desk job, but he took early retirement instead and started his spy equipment and consultation business in Hollywood.
“You’re looking good, Nan.”
“Thanks. You look well.”
He sucked in air through his teeth as he took in the long scar on her neck. “Yikes.”
She self-consciously turned her left side, with the scar, away from him. “You should have seen the other guy.”
“So I heard. You’re a hero.”
She allowed a lackluster shrug. The topic had become tiresome for her. “What about you? Doing a double gainer off a flight of steel steps in pursuit of a homeless man who was trying to show the president his dangerous petrified snake.”
He grinned. “Just protecting the commander in chief. Did you get the message I left on your house phone? I called after that thing with your bad guy came down.”
“I got your message. Thanks. I wanted to call back, but had a lot going on.” That wasn’t why she hadn’t returned his call. She hadn’t wanted to open a dialogue with him, even though she’d heard he’d gotten married. She’d only called him now because she needed a favor. He owed her one, as she’d done him a big favor years ago when they were both rookies.
“You look happy,” he said.
“Things are good. You don’t look too worse for wear yourself.”
He patted his firm midsection, emitting a solid thump. “Try to keep things in shape. Someone might want it one of these days.”
“I heard you’d gotten married.”
“I did.” After a few seconds, he held up his fingers as if conceding that he couldn’t come up with a clever response or deciding not to BS her. “It didn’t work out.”
His demeanor had turned almost sheepish. She didn’t pursue it. “What’s this?” She pointed at his shaved head, which had a shadow of new growth, showing the map of his receded hairline.
“Argh…Losing my hair. Looks better with it shaved off.” He tilted his head. “Rub it. It’s good luck. Go ahead.”
She laughed and didn’t move to take him up on the offer.
He straightened, his eyes sparkling. “What?”
“You’re hopeless.”
“So are you dating anyone?” he asked.
“I am.”
He waited a second for more, and then asked, “What does he do?”
“He’s a cop.”
“I could have figured that one. Is he with Pasadena?”
She turned up her hand. “Does it matter?”
“That’s a yes.” When she didn’t elaborate, he moved on. “How’s Emily?”
“She’s great. Just turned fifteen.”
“No way. Where does the time go?”
She took out her wallet and showed him Em’s latest school photo.
He seemed remorseful. “She’s gorgeous. She looks just like you.” He handed the photo back.
“Thanks. She’s a great kid. Kind. Smart. Too smart, sometimes. How’s biz?”
“Fantastic. It’s a great time for surveillance and countersurveillance. So who lives here?”
“My mother. She was dating Vince Madrigal.”
He made a face. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“You know him?”
“Oh yeah. I have a couple of high-profile clients who kept me busy removing bugs and other surveillance equipment that Madrigal installed. Heard he was about to be indicted for illegal wiretaps, among other things. He was friends with a dirty LAPD sergeant who did illegal background checks for him. Madrigal used to hire thugs to intimidate his clients’ enemies. Tough-guy Mafioso stuff, like leaving dead fish wrapped in newspapers with messages: ‘Drop the lawsuit or else.’ Why was your mom mixed up with him?”
Vining rolled her eyes. “I don’t know. A good friend of hers, a well-connected Pasadena socialite, drowned in her backyard pool under suspicious circumstances. I’m thinking the dead woman might have had damaging information and someone hired Madrigal to find out about it. Madrigal might have used my mother to get access to her friend. We’ll head over to the friend’s house after we’re done here. Thanks, Chad, for coming out, especially on such short notice.”
“You’re welcome. I owed you one.”
“We’re even.”
He went around to the front passenger door and picked up a briefcase from the floor. “Does this mean you won’t call me anymore?” He locked the car. “What am I saying? You don’t call me now.”
“Come on. We’re friends.” She’d mentioned to Kissick that she’d dated a few guys in the early years after her divorce, but had never named names or gone into specifics and he hadn’t asked. Chad had been her only semi-serious relationship.
Holding the briefcase, he locked the car door. “Nan, we’ll never be friends. Not that way, meeting for coffee and chewing the fat.”
He gave her a look and she knew he was right. There was too much sexual tension between them. She felt it now.
“So we’re professional colleagues.”
“If that’s what works for you, Nan.”
She led the way to the town house complex gate, unlocked it, and went through first. Standing there joking with Chad was like old times. While she knew herself and knew she wasn’t in danger of stepping over the line with him, the small, fun flirting felt like a betrayal of Kissick.
While she was unlocking her mother’s front door, he moved to stand close behind her. He wasn’t touching her, but was close enough for her to feel his breath on her hair and to sense a vibration from him.
“Nan, for me, you’ll always be the one who got away.”
She opened the door. Before she went inside, she turned to face him. They were nearly nose-to-nose. “Chad, I’m in love with my boyfriend.”
He stepped back, putting a polite distance between them. “He’s a lucky guy.”
She said, with sincerity and for the first time ever about a man, “I’m the lucky one.”
TWENTY-THREE
Chad began sweeping for bugs in the living room, pacing with an electronic device about the size of a DVD player slung by a strap over his shoulder and waving a wand across the walls, ceiling, and inside cabinets.
Vining went upstairs to the smaller bedroom Patsy used as a guest room and office. She hooked up an external disk drive she’d bought at Best Buy on the way over and started copying the hard disk of her mother’s old desktop computer. She began searching Patsy’s bills and bank statements. She wasn’t completely surprised when she found a stack of overdue credit card bills, notices from collection agencies, and a dozen presumably maxed-out credit cards wrapped with a rubber band, but it was jarring to hold evidence of what she’d suspected and to see how bad the problem was. The interest and fees the credit card companies tacked on had made the balances ratchet up quickly.
While she was sitting there, Patsy received several phone calls from collection agents, some leavin
g threatening messages. That explained why Patsy would only pick up her home phone after Vining or Em had started to leave a message, giving an excuse that she was in the shower or on the patio.
Vining was horrified. Patsy had always been a spendthrift, but she had no clue that her mom was in this kind of trouble. In a closet, she found boxes of old financial records. Pulling some at random, she saw that Patsy had skirted the edge of financial disaster for years, but had managed to keep it at bay. Things had started to go out of control about two years ago.
That was when the creep had attacked Vining, sending her into a three-day coma and a yearlong leave of absence. Had that been the tipping point that had caused Patsy to lose her bearings? Vining had always felt like the glue that held their little family together. She now saw the extent to which she was.
She thought back to her mother pulling out a wad of twenties to buy groceries and the expensive necklace she’d bought Em. In the bank statements, Vining saw the direct deposit of Patsy’s biweekly Macy’s paycheck but didn’t see evidence of other income. She remembered her mother’s tipsy hint last night about having surprising secrets. Had she been working for Madrigal?
The bank statements had images of paid checks that the bank provided in lieu of returning the actual cancelled checks. Granny had written some checks to Patsy, a couple of hundred dollars here and there. This made Vining more mad than anything she’d seen so far. She didn’t see any checks written by Tink or her other friends. It made sense. Patsy would have been too proud to reveal her dire financial situation to her friends.
Angry tears burned Vining’s eyes as the phone rang yet again. A collection agent began leaving a hostile message. She couldn’t resist picking up the phone.
“This is Detective Nan Vining of the police department. You are in violation of the California Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. You cannot make threats during a call to collect money. Consider this your first warning.” She slammed down the phone.
She bundled up her mother’s phone bills for the past six months, rubber-banded them, and did the same with her bank statements. She’d planned to be more discreet, rushing out to photocopy documents and returning them before Patsy was the wiser, but she was so ticked off, she didn’t care.
She heard Chad’s steps on the stairs.
“I’m in here,” she shouted when she heard him go into the other room.
He found her and approached with his open palm held out. In it were several small black objects the size of dimes.
“I found these in your mother’s downstairs phones and in the wall behind that art print over the couch. They’re components of a hook-switch bypass. It’s a common way to bug a telephone and one of Madrigal’s signature surveillance methods. I can’t tell you how many of these I’ve pulled out of homes and offices that Madrigal bugged.”
“How does it work?”
“When a telephone has been bypassed, it becomes ‘hot on hook.’ The handset is modified so that even if the phone is hung up, it can intercept conversations in the room and pass them down the phone line to a listening post. The components cost about forty-five cents. Turns the telephone into a room bug. It’s a parasitic eavesdropping device, meaning it pirates its operating power from a source such as a telephone line or the house wiring. It doesn’t need its own battery.”
“Is someone listening to us now?”
“Maybe. An off-site listening post could be anywhere. You just need a telephone landline.”
Vining lined up the bugs on the desk, wondering if Madrigal had been eavesdropping on Patsy to make sure she was holding up her end of the deal, whatever it was.
Chad picked up the handset of the cordless phone on the desk and started removing the plastic case.
Vining checked the progress of the auxiliary drive’s backup of the computer’s hard disk, gathered up the documents she was taking, and went into her mother’s bedroom.
Patsy’s bedrooms through the years and across different locations were always outfitted the same. King-sized beds with frilly coverings, copious throw pillows, and tattered childhood toys: a Teddy bear, a Winnie the Pooh, and a stuffed doll with round sunglasses, purple and black striped legs, and black vinyl boots. Vining wondered whether her mother’s husbands having to sleep in such an overly feminine and juvenile environment had contributed to her many failed marriages.
Jane Fonda’s autobiography was on the nightstand. A price sticker showed that Patsy had bought it at Costco. She’d used the front book jacket flap to mark the page. She was halfway through. Beneath it were several tabloid gossip magazines.
Vining went to the closet, which was jammed with clothes and shoes. Some garments still had price tags on them. Boxes held shoes that had never been worn. Clothes had fallen off the packed closet rod and were crumpled on the floor.
Patsy shopped to feel better.
On top of the dresser was her mother’s jewelry box, which she’d had as long as Vining could remember. She opened it and poked her finger around the mounds of mostly costume jewelry and few pieces of fine jewelry, but nothing grand. She found some that she and her sister Stephanie used to play with when they were kids. Patsy had never gotten rid of any of her jewelry, and the box contained a forty-year fashion retrospective.
She carried the box to the bed. From a tangled mound of necklaces, she freed one that used to be her mother’s favorite. It was a gold-filled medallion of Taurus the bull on a heavy twisted chain. Taurus was an apt Zodiac sign for Patsy. Vining put on the necklace. She followed it with a peace symbol on a leather cord and a gold Italian horn on a serpentine gold chain from Patsy’s disco days in the seventies.
Taking off her own simple pearl earrings, Vining donned drop earrings with dangling mirrored disco balls. She found a mood ring. Her hands were larger than her mother’s and it only fit on her pinkie.
She lifted out a panel in the box, revealing a lower layer, and found dozens of slogan buttons: Boycott Grapes/Support United Farm Workers; Out of Vietnam; McGovern for President; happy faces. The three ring boxes were still there with Patsy’s rings from her previous marriages. While her diamond engagement rings were far from Elizabeth Taylor caliber, each subsequent marriage had brought a bigger stone.
Vining took out a small box covered in fake red leather embossed in gold. The inside was lined with gold velveteen, just as Vining remembered. Rings from Patsy’s first two marriages shared the box. A slender, plain gold band from her marriage to Vining’s father, her first and briefest, was crammed into the padded velveteen slot with the white-gold wedding set with the quarter-carat diamond from her second marriage, to Stephanie’s father.
When playing dress-up, Stephanie would claim the wedding set, leaving Vining the Spartan gold band. Patsy explained that when she’d married the first time, they had been very young—she had just turned eighteen—and the gold band was all they could afford.
Vining slipped the band over the first knuckle of her ring finger, as far as it would go, and recalled her disappointment. A plain gold band that didn’t even have its own box was all that was left of Patsy’s marriage to her father. A man so rotten, Patsy had always claimed, that she would not even speak his name.
Vining twisted the ring on her finger and traveled to a place she rarely went, thinking about the passive-aggressive cruelty in her mother’s refusal to even reveal her father’s name. Vining used to press her for information about him when she was little but gave it up. When she grew to be tall and dark, so different from her blond, petite mother and sister, Patsy confessed that Vining took after her father. That was the sum total of what Vining knew about him: he was tall and dark; he’d given her mother a gold wedding band; and he’d abandoned his wife and infant daughter and disappeared.
Granny hadn’t been any help in clarifying things. In response to Vining’s questions, she would only say, “You have to talk to your mother about that.” Her tone was so bristly, Vining had been intimidated to ask further.
Later, she’d married young her
self, right after her high school graduation, and soon had a daughter. In a few years, she was a divorced single mother. For a while, she’d had a chilling thought that, in spite of her fervent desire not to emulate her mother’s life, she had done just that. She’d steeled herself and vowed that Emily would not grow up in the same environment she had—not knowing her father and with a trail of men coming in and out of the house.
Even though she’d wanted to kill Wes for leaving her and two-year-old Emily to take up with Kaitlyn, his young Super Cuts hairstylist, she made sure she kept their relationship civil. Wes was committed to being in Emily’s life.
As far as her thoughts about her own father, she’d been too busy to dwell on them. Now though, again wearing the thin gold band she’d played with as a child, she found herself with space in her life for new challenges—and for old hurts. She was again angry at her mother for many things, past and present, and the issue of her father again bubbled to the surface.
“Found the same setup in the office.” Chad entered the bedroom, holding the bugs he’d pulled out of the office phone. “What are you doing?”
She glanced in a mirror over the dresser. She looked ridiculous. “Fooling around.”
She took off the necklaces and earrings, and crammed the gold band back inside its shared space in the ring box. Pulling the mood ring off her pinkie, she noticed that the color had turned black.
Later, at Tink’s house, Chad found hook-switch bypasses in all the landlines, including the separate phone line in Cheyenne’s room.
Vining walked him to the door. “I wish I could find Madrigal’s listening post. Love to get my hands on the recorded conversations.”
“I’ll put in a few calls and see if I can get any information for you.”
She didn’t prolong their good-bye and held out her hand. “Chad, thanks a bunch.”
He got the message. “No problem. See you around, Nan. Take care.”
“You too.”
