by Scott Frost
“We got a hit on one of those names.”
She laid it on my desk and walked out. It was a rap sheet for the temp employee Breem had hired.
“Frank Sweeny, did thirteen months in Lompoc of a four-year sentence for forgery.” I turned to Traver, who was already playing out the implications in his head. All of which meant that the kiss on his twins’ foreheads was getting farther and farther away.
“What was that you said about keeping it simple?” I said.
“It was just a thought.”
I handed him the rap sheet. He studied it for a moment then let the facts bounce around in his head as if he were jangling change in a pocket.
“How does a guy go from doing thirteen months for writing bad paper to executing a guy for two grand?”
“They don’t,” I said.
“What if it was more than two grand?”
“What if it was something else?”
“Such as . . .”
“Tonight is not the night for me to make assumptions about anything.”
“Am I supposed to understand what you’re talking about?” Traver asked.
“Not for another fifteen years.”
He tossed the rap sheet back on the desk. “Could be just what it appears to be. Some kid with a twenty-five auto who gets lucky and scores, then panics and steps up to the big time.”
“Then who opened the front door?”
Traver took a deep breath and blew it out like he was expelling smoke.
“You want to wake the son of a bitch Sweeny up? Rattle his cage?”
“If he’s involved, then the address he gave Breem will be worthless.”
“If he isn’t, we’re wasting our time and ruining his night of sleep, not to mention ours.”
I looked at the photograph of my daughter on my desk. It was from a camping trip when she was fourteen. She was standing in front of a giant sequoia in a plaid shirt and cutoffs, her arms held out to her sides, palms spread wide. She was looking up toward the sun with a huge smile on her face. It was taken two months after I divorced her father. My timing having always been impeccable in regards to matters of the heart, three months after the divorce he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. He lasted five more hideous months connected to tubes and flooded with drugs. In Lacy’s adolescent mind it was all somehow my fault, which was not all that different from the way I saw it. He was the one who cheated, and I was the one who felt like I had failed. His dying after I divorced him was just further confirmation in my mind that he was the real victim through it all instead of me.
I had thought for a long time that Lacy’s smile in the photograph was because she had passed through some rubicon that had set us free from the baggage her father had dumped on us. Looking at it now I realized that wasn’t it at all. She looked liked she was about to take flight, slowly circling up around a tree that had witnessed nearly a quarter of all of human history. What Lacy had found were kindred spirits, survivors, mute participants who silently endured all the poison we could dump on them from the moment they rose out of the soil. Not so different from being a kid.
“I should have told her I loved her,” I said silently in my head.
Dave cleared his throat. “So what do you think? We gonna do this?”
I looked at Dave sitting anxiously on the edge of the chair.
“We’ll pay him a visit in the morning,” I said. “Go home and kiss the twins.”
3
I WAITED at the office until four A.M., when the coroner’s investigator called and said he had cleared the body and sealed the scene. Then I cut the witness Breem loose to go home and placed the surveillance tape in evidence lockup. When I got in the Volvo, I slipped a Pablo Casals tape in the deck and drove to Lake Street, where I took a left and headed up toward the foothills, the lights of downtown Los Angeles in my mirrors.
I would give the case a rest for a few hours. I would get an hour and a half of sleep and then I would do what real mothers do: I’d make Lacy eggs, toast and jam, some orange juice, then I would sit at the breakfast table with her and say all the things to her that I should have said last night.
I turned onto Mariposa and headed for our house. A white Hyundai pulled out in front of me from the curb, nearly clipping my right front bumper, and the driver began tossing The Star News out the window onto driveways. I passed on the left and glanced at the driver. In the faint light he looked foreign, maybe European, late twenties, unshaven, the tired, sunken eyes of a recent immigrant who had jumped ship for the American dream and found it contained two minimum-wage jobs and four hours of sleep a night.
Out of habit, I glanced one more time in the mirror at the Hyundai, then my lights caught the eyes of a coyote, glowing red in the darkness, standing in the middle of Mariposa. As I approached, it moved casually over to the side, then just as casually reclaimed its position in the middle of the street once I had passed.
Near the end of the block I hit the garage remote and pulled up the drive to my three-bedroom ranch. My breath caught as if I had been grabbed from behind. Lacy’s yellow Honda wasn’t in the garage. I sat there until I could take a breath, then got out, staring at the empty space next to my own car.
“Shit” quietly slipped out of my mouth. If I had only . . . Don’t go there, but I wanted to. Why didn’t I say something to her? What was I afraid of?
I heard the slap of the paper hitting the driveway and glanced toward the street. The white Hyundai sat at the end of the drive until I walked back and picked up the paper before it drove quickly away squealing its tires.
“If I had only been smarter,” I said, steam rising into the chilly air.
Over the top of the San Gabriels, the first hint of light tinted the dark purple of the sky with the warm glow of sunlight. A lizard rustled in the ivy that covered the hillside below the house. A crow sitting on top of a telephone pole croaked its first call of the day. I looked down the street and noticed that the Hyundai had driven on without tossing out any more papers. It seemed strange, but what the hell didn’t at this point.
I opened the paper and glanced at the front page. The headline read: A ROSE QUEEN BY ANY OTHER NAME? Below it was a photograph of Lacy holding out the spray bottle, her mouth open in an angry shout.
I folded it under my arm and for an instant had the brief thought of running down the street and grabbing all the papers before the neighbors wandered out in their robes and slippers. Up the block the yellow light from a kitchen came spilling into the predawn. Too late. I walked inside and closed the garage door behind me.
On the kitchen table Lacy had left a note.
“How can you be so clueless. . . . I’m at a friend’s.”
I sighed and sat down. So much for breakfast plans. I looked at the refrigerator and then over at the stove. I couldn’t remember the last time I had actually cooked a meal for the two of us. I remembered talking about it, I may have even bought groceries, but I didn’t cook anything. I looked at the bowl of fruit on the table and realized I had no idea how it had come to be sitting in my kitchen. For all I know it might have grown from seed.
I grabbed a banana from the bowl, then turned the light out and walked through the dark house. I hesitated at Lacy’s door and looked inside, hoping against all evidence to the contrary that she would be there. It was empty. I walked inside and lay down on her bed. I could smell the sweetness of her hair on the pillow. It reminded me of when she was a baby and her scent would linger in my arms long after I had put her down for the night. Her red taffeta dress from the pageant lay in a pile in the middle of the floor, along with some dirty socks, a bra, and a Green-peace sweatshirt.
“Clueless,” I whispered into the dark. Then I peeled the banana, laid it on my chest, and fell asleep without taking a bite.
FOUR HOURS LATER I woke up. There were six messages on the phone machine that I hadn’t seen when I came home; two were Lacy’s friends who thought what she had done was totally radical, two were reporters from local televis
ion stations requesting interviews, and one was Lacy’s school principal, who thought it might be a good idea if we got together and talked about Lacy’s home environment. The last one was a fan of the Rose Parade who thought the mother of such a child must be a piece of shit, a degenerate, a slut bitch who isn’t fit to raise a chimp.
On the heels of receiving such good news I walked into the kitchen to defend my motherhood and scrambled two eggs, made toast, and had half a grapefruit. I overcooked the eggs.
I left a note for Lacy asking her to call me on my cell so I knew she was all right, and then told her I would be home later and we would talk, or more precisely, I would listen and learn about the depths of my cluelessness.
Stepping outside I noticed the first hint of a Pacific storm was bumping into the base of the foothills and dropping a steady light mist. Up in the mountains the white spiked flowers of yuccas glowed in dull gray light. A low bank of dark clouds hung just over the top of downtown L.A. on the distant horizon.
News of what my daughter had done was all over morning talk radio. Even the local public station jumped into the fray, though their point of view weighed heavily toward the broader geopolitical side of pesticides and habitat destruction, as opposed to a teenager just acting out to get her mother’s attention. One caller actually described Lacy as the progeny of Rachel Carson.
At the plaza I noticed the first heads turning as soon as I stepped out of the car in the parking lot. This was how it was going to be from now on, I figured—heads turning, finger-pointing. “There goes the failed mother of that girl.” I would be the Typhoid Mary of the Rose Parade, the mother who let a hundred years of tradition slip through her fingers. Inside Homicide I received a standing ovation and then found half a dozen plastic spray bottles with concealed-weapon permits sitting on the desk in my office.
Traver knocked on the door and stepped in looking as solemn as a visitor to a funeral home.
“I heard,” he said, broaching the subject carefully. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.”
“I don’t,” I said.
“Maybe it would be good to talk about it.”
“For who?”
“How is she?”
“She stayed at a friend’s house last night.”
“That’s good.”
“Not for me.”
“You want to talk about it?”
“No.”
Traver stood there silent for a moment, his eyes looking like they were trying to find a destination on a map. Then he nodded and said, “If you do—”
“Thanks,” I interrupted.
“I’m here, whenever you’re ready.”
“To talk?”
“Absolutely.”
I nodded. “I’m a degenerate slut bitch who isn’t fit to raise a chimp,” I said, then started for the door to go question the temp employee Sweeny.
Traver looked at me for a moment not sure how to respond. Then he smiled and started out the door after me.
“I love chimps.”
THE ADDRESS we had for Sweeny was one of six small white bungalows that lined a short drive off Mission in South Pasadena. They were one of the early attempts at postwar housing that dotted older neighborhoods and were now mostly filled with low-income Mexican immigrants.
There were a few plastic children’s toys scattered along the drive. Grass grew in tufts between cracks in the cement. The bungalows needed paint and new roofs. A few bedraggled-looking birds of paradise were planted along the foundation. The wet weather only seemed to heighten the sense that this housing built for returning GIs had seen better days.
Traver looked at the numbers then motioned toward the back.
“He should be in the last one on the right.”
As we walked to the end, I noticed a few curtains pulled aside and suspicious brown faces watching us pass, before quickly disappearing when it was clear that we weren’t there for them. From one of the bungalows came the sweet aroma of pork carnitas slowly roasting in an oven. In two of the others the tinny sound of TVs drifted out through the ill-fitting windows. We walked up to Sweeny’s front door. Some yellow-stained shades were drawn over the window next to the door. A wet, pink flyer for carpet cleaning lay on the stoop, the color bleeding onto the damp concrete.
“Don’t suppose they get a lot of business here,” Traver said, looking down at the flyer.
I knocked on the door. There was no response, no sound of any movement inside.
“What time was he supposed to be at work at the florist’s today?”
“Not till later.”
I knocked again and said, “Police,” and again there was no response.
The mug shot we had from Sweeny’s forgery arrest placed him firmly in the everyman category: dark hair, five-eleven, features designed to blend into whatever environment he was in.
“I’m going to walk around and see if there’s a back door,” I said and started toward the side of the bungalow.
Traver grabbed the handle of the door and tested it.
“Hey, it’s open.”
He pushed it open without stepping in and yelled, “Police!”
Through the side window I saw a white flash that was the ignition point. I started to yell to Dave but it was already too late. The explosion was shaped and directed to kill a person stepping inside. The speed with which my world changed was astonishing. A rush of hot air knocked me sideways, showering me with pieces of glass from the window. As I was falling I looked toward the front of the bungalow and saw Dave disappear in a cloud of dust and debris as the door blew off its hinges, somersaulting across the alley, where it stuck in the wall of the facing bungalow.
And then it was over. Barely the blink of an eye.
I was lying on the wet ground, the bitter taste of dust filling my mouth. Rising up to my knees, I felt the wet trickle of blood down the side of my face and out my nose, which also began to bleed. I reached up and found a nickel-sized piece of glass from the window had penetrated my scalp just above the hairline and was embedded in my skin. Though I wasn’t aware of the sound of the blast itself, I was acutely aware of the silence that followed it. It was like a shroud had been placed over everything within the area of the explosion. The air itself felt dead, empty, like the blast had created a lifeless hole in space.
Unsteadily I rose to my feet and looked over at the front of the bungalow. The mist that had been falling had turned to rain as if shaken loose from the force of the explosion. The soft plops of raindrops hitting the ground broke the dull, strange silence. The acrid odor of explosives filled the air. I lost my balance for a moment then righted myself.
One of Dave’s brown shoes sat on the first step of the bungalow, its laces still tied in a bow. Dave lay on his back in the middle of the drive, his shoeless foot resting on the other leg, his green sock hanging halfway off his foot like a little kid who had been playing in the yard without his shoes.
I walked over to him and knelt down. His unfocused eyes were open and unmoving. His face was covered in small cuts and thin spidery lines where blood vessels had ruptured from the concussion. Both his arms were outstretched above his head with his sport jacket pulled halfway up each arm. The buttons of his shirt had been blown off and the shirt lay open, exposing his chest. Drops of rain began to wash tiny lines of dust and grit down his stomach.
“Dave?”
If he heard me, he gave no indication. I placed my fingers on his neck until I found the faint rhythm of a pulse. His chest filled weakly with short breaths.
“Dave?” I yelled again.
The white of his right eye flooded with a hemorrhage, turning a bright, crimson red. He blinked several times, then focused on me for a moment as if I had just arrived for a surprise visit.
“Dave, can you hear me?”
A moment of understanding flashed in his eyes.
“There was an explosion. You’re hurt.”
His lips moved as he tried to speak, but nothing came out. He tried again
and then faintly said, “No shit.”
A frightened Mexican woman in her mid-thirties stepped out of one of the other bungalows.
“Do you speak English?” I yelled.
The woman nodded.
“Call nine-one-one, tell them ‘Officer down.’ ”
“No phone,” the woman said.
I looked back at Dave, but his eyes had slipped away again. I stood up and started toward the car and the radio inside. Halfway there I heard the first sirens already on the way to the scene. I reached the car and picked up the radio anyway and called in an “Officer down” call, just so there was no doubt about the amount of help that would be on the way.
As I started back toward Dave, I noticed that glass from each of the bungalows had shattered and littered the drive. Blood began to drip into my right eye. I reached up and painfully touched the small piece of glass embedded in my scalp. I again checked Dave’s pulse and found it unchanged. His eyes had rolled back in his head.
I pulled out my Glock and moved to the front of the bungalow, where the shattered door frame hung by a single nail. I raised my weapon and scanned the inside of the bungalow to make sure Sweeny had nothing else planned. Everything behind the source of the explosion was intact, as if nothing had happened. A mug, half-filled with coffee, sat on the small dinette table. Next to the mug several empty beer bottles still stood upright. The third of the room in the direction of the blast was a shambles. The woodwork had been splintered, the plaster walls turned to dust and now lay on the floor.
As my mind began to clear from the fog of the concussion, I noticed the fragments and wires of the triggering mechanism in pieces on the scorched wood floor. I holstered my gun and rushed back to Dave as the first squads pulled up with sirens blaring. A fire truck was on their heels and a paramedic unit right behind them, and still the air was filled with sirens. Nothing brings help faster than an “Officer down” call. And no call is more dreaded.
I stood over Dave wishing I could do something and feeling helpless that the best I could do was nothing. An officer walked up to me and said something, but I didn’t hear it. Several firemen knelt over Dave and began administering to him. Another took me by the arm and walked me over to the step of another bungalow, sat me down, and slipped on a pair of blue latex gloves that were unnaturally bright in the rain.
