Bad Intent

Chapter 6

“You two get yourselves married yet?” Oscar Flint, Mike’s dad, winked at me over the top of his beer bottle, his first drink since he’d arrived, but certainly not his first of the day. “Or you just shackin’ up?”

“Give it a rest, Pop,” Mike said.

“We’re just shackin’ up, Oscar.” I was standing in front of the open refrigerator. I handed Mike a head of lettuce and a big, ripe tomato. “Anyone ready for another beer?”

“Not yet.” Oscar persisted: “I don’t know what’s holdin’ you two back. Hell, Mike’s already taken the long walk two times. He knows it don’t hurt none.”

“We don’t want to talk about it, Pop.” Mike was supposed to be making a green salad. He began chopping lettuce into tiny little bits with a very large knife. Wisely, Oscar moved toward the far side of the kitchen counter.

Oscar was a sturdy block of a man, not nearly as tall as Mike and Michael-they’re both six-two. He had heavy, square, working-man’s hands. His face was deeply lined, a road map of hard living and power drinking. He still had a full head of kinky red hair. I couldn’t see much of him in Mike except for a certain cast to his posture and the furrow between his eyebrows. And a few rough edges; sometimes rough edges give you something to hold on to.

I held my breath while I turned the chicken under the broiler. Then I picked up the bag of fresh corn on the cob and carried it over next to Oscar. He didn’t offer to help shuck it.

“It’s wonderful to meet you at last, Oscar,” I said, stripping an ear. “Mike has told me a lot about you.”

“I just bet he has,” Oscar chuckled. “We did okay, though, didn’t we Mikey? He tell you I had me a little body and fender shop over in Glendale?”

“It was a chop shop,” Mike said. “He was always getting raided by the DMV.”

“Worked a lot of hours,” Oscar went on, “but we scraped by, the two of us. ‘Course, with all the government regulation nowadays, you can’t hardly support a family with a small business like that. Deduct this, insure that, pay out to Social Security and unemployment and all that crap for your employees, pretty soon you got nothin’ left to buy groceries with. It don’t pay to run a business no more. Had to close the place down.”

“Pop, you never made a Social Security payment in your life.” Mike looked up at me from his lettuce pile. “He used to hire illegals, Maggie, and always paid them in cash so there were no books.”

“I don’t apologize for it,” Oscar said, cocksure. “Them Mexes was real good workers. Learned fast, put in a full day’s work. You can’t find hard workers like that no more. Everyone nowadays wants a free ride.”

Mike chuckled. “Nothing stays the same.”

“Now that’s the truth.” Oscar emphasized the point by putting down his empty beer bottle with a clunk. He looked over at me. “What line of work’s your folks in, honey?”

“My father teaches physics at UC Berkeley,” I said. “My mother was a concert pianist until her arthritis became too bothersome. Now she directs a musical conservatory in the Bay Area.”

“Well, la-di-da.” Oscar raised a pinkie and waved it at Mike. “Last wife’s a looker, this one’s a brain. At least, when you two get around to having kids, they’ll be musical.”

Mike glanced up. “We aren’t married and we’re not having any kids.”

“Mikey’s mom played the piano, too.” Oscar rattled on as if he hadn’t heard Mike. “He ever tell you? Big lounge out on Pico. Nice place, pretty good money, too. She did that till she lost her figure after the third kid. Then she went to slinging burgers at a drive-in down in Montebello. Almost in East L.A. What a dump. Biker hangout. That’s where she met the asshole she run away with. Moved her and Mikey’s sisters up to Merced. Guess she’s still there.”

“She died three years ago, Pop. Remember? We went up for the funeral.”

“Oh, yeah.” Oscar deepened the furrow between his eyebrows and thought it over. Seeming confused, he looked up at Mike. “Got another beer in that icebox, Mikey?”

“Sorry, Pop,” Mike said. “We’re all out.”

There were two six-packs behind the watermelon.

Mike seemed to be embarrassed by his father or something his father had said. That surprised me, because I thought I knew him better. With me, Mike had always been open about his hardscrabble upbringing, the scrapes his alcoholic parents got into, a few narrow misses with the law of his own. I wondered what nerve Oscar had touched.

All of us carry wounds from childhood that neither time nor accomplishment can heal. Now and then those old wounds get hit just right and they start to bleed, no matter how hard we try to keep them covered up. As I watched Oscar standing there, weaving a little in the middle of Mike’s shiny kitchen, I began to wonder if maybe he had brought with him the scary specter of the kid who used to bail his dad out of the drunk tank every Monday morning, the kid who signed his own report cards when he didn’t know where to find his mother.

I have made it a point to forget everything I learned in Dr. Hauser’s Modern European philosophy. But what came to mind out of somewhere was Nietzsche: “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Fine. But we can be strong and still hurt like hell.

I picked cornsilk from my fingers and went over to my tall, white-haired Mike. He was lost in thought, reducing the fat tomato to runny pulp. I touched his hand above the knife and he looked over at me, expectant, waiting for a question.

I stretched up and whispered into his ear. “I love you, Mike.”

He smiled, oddly shy. I guessed because Oscar was there. Maybe not.

“How’d I get so lucky?” he said. He looked down at the pulverized tomatoes. “We’re making tacos, right?”

“Broiled chicken and salad.”

He laughed then, and started to say something I’m sure would have been pithy. But, like so many epiphanal moments in my life, the telephone interrupted. Mike wiped his hands and reached for it. “Flint,” he said into the receiver, and then, “No shit,” a couple of times. As he hung up, he was reaching for the small television that sits on the counter next to the sink.

“What is it?” I asked.

“That was Merritt. Says to turn on the news.”

The Parker Center demonstration was headline news-rocks and bottles thrown, a case of heat prostration-but “in-depth analysis” of the issue behind the fuss was promised after the weather report. We were waiting for the anchor to get to it when Casey and Michael burst in from the ice cream store, optimists in that miserable weather, carrying an insulated bag that was already leaking.

“Hi, Pop,” Michael said, clapping his grandfather on the shoulder in passing as he dashed to the freezer. “How’s it going?”

“Just fine, son. Just fine,” Oscar grinned. “Who’s your tall friend?”

It was Casey’s turn to blush.

“Oscar,” I said, “this is my daughter, Casey.”

Oscar made a show of looking all the way from her toes to the top of her head. “Your daddy play basketball?”

“No,” Casey sighed. “He’s a litigator. And the weather up here is hot.”

Borderline smart-alecky, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

On the screen, the weatherman predicted hundred-degree weather through the week.

“Come on, Casey,” Michael said, taking her elbow and leading her toward the living room. “Let’s dub those CD’s. If you’re going to ride the bus, you’ll need lots of tapes for your Walkman.”

“Pretty cute couple,” Oscar said when the kids were gone.

Mike said, “Ssh,” and leaned toward the television.

A background roll showed the front of the county Criminal Courts building downtown L.A. Howard Mansell, a veteran local-news reporter, read from notes ruffled by the hot wind. “In an extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented move, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has joined with defense attorneys representing a convicted murderer in asking the Superior Court not only to free a man the D.A. worked to convict a number of years ago, but also in asking the judge to wipe his conviction from the records.

“Fourteen years ago, Charles Pinkerton Conklin was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison for shooting a police officer inside a Southeast Los Angeles service station restroom. The preponderance of evidence was supplied by two juvenile eyewitnesses who testified they saw Conklin at the murder scene. In affidavits presented to the district attorney by Reverend Leroy Burgess, those eyewitnesses now say that undue and unrelenting pressure from the investigating detectives frightened them sufficiently to cause them to lie when they identified Charles Conklin.

“The district attorney stopped short of pronouncing Conklin innocent of the crime, saying instead that the actions of the police so tainted the trial that the verdict must be set aside. A hearing has been set for Monday, one week from today.

“The police department’s only comment has been to say that they are conducting their own inquiries.”

I turned to Mike, furious. “You lied to me.”

“I did not.” Mike was watching Oscar get his own beer from the refrigerator, apparently more worried about another beer than about defending himself. “It’s political bullshit. Cops make good targets.”

“I know who Conklin is,” I said. “Mike, you set me up with Etta.”

“Yeah. So?”

“You just plain set me up.”

“It isn’t that way.”

On screen, Mansell went to comments from friends and family of the imprisoned man. Mike reached to turn off the television, but I stopped him when I saw a too-familiar face filling the screen. I yanked up the volume, the better to hear my own fifteen-hundred-dollar piece of tape roll. The copy wasn’t very good, washed Etta’s mocha makeup with a reddish cast. But then, Ralph had run copies in a hurry, probably on the cheap.

Mike watched Etta on the screen, horrified.

“You ax me,” Etta was saying, looking into the lens I had held that morning, “I say it’s the lying police should hang they heads for takin’ away the baby daddy, puttin’ him in that jail for his child’s whole damn life. What’s he suppose’ to do?… Fourteen years for somethin’ he ain’t even done. You lock up an innocent man that way, who’s gonna see to it his boy come up right?”