Bad Intent

Chapter 8

At eleven, when I got back to Encino, the night was still warm and the condo grounds were still deserted. I had expected people to be outside when the air had cooled off, to walk or swim, or get blasted al fresco. If they had come out, they had gone back inside early. The quiet was beautiful. I walked straight to the pool.

Again, no one. For a change, there were no splashing toddlers, no cocktail-hour schmoozers and oglers, no senior watercisers. Simply, no one. Such a rare circumstance left me with no alternative: I stripped to bra and bikini panties, black ones, and dove into the cool still water.

The first lap was heavy going. My arms seemed weighted and I couldn’t find my rhythm. By the third lap, I was moving easily, loose and strong. I didn’t bother to count turns, I just swam like a machine until my thighs were full of fire and my shoulder muscles froze up from fatigue.

At the point where I could not swim another stroke, I stopped in the middle of the pool, rolled onto my back, and looked up into the black and starless night. I floated while I caught my breath, my heaving chest sending ripples around me.

The pool was a delicious luxury. So was the solitude. I thought about the kids at Jordan Downs who had access to neither. I suffered a flash of guilt for the pleasure I was having, a pang akin to the stab I felt when Oscar said “la-di-da” when I told him what my parents do. He had meant it as a put-down.

I wasn’t born poor, nor was I born rich. We were hardworking comfortable, somewhere in that range where children might have ponies but weren’t taken skiing in St. Moritz. I was never coddled or spoiled. I never went hungry. In my heart I knew I had nothing to be ashamed of. But, as Guido had pointed out, my heart still bled for everyone else.

Relaxed to the point of sleepiness, I hauled myself out of the water, slipped into my shirt, gathered my things, and stumbled home.

Michael was asleep on the living room sofa. He had ceded his bedroom to Casey, how willingly I wasn’t sure. I suspect that it had been Mike’s idea, born out of a notion that girls need more privacy than boys, some stubborn remnant of chivalry. Whatever, it was a noble gesture, a big help in the short run. I felt very strongly that we had to find Michael a space of his own, and soon.

We were looking for a bigger house.

From habit, I checked on Casey, saw her sleeping in the usual tangle with Bowser. I yawned, wiped away the water running down my neck, and opened my own bedroom door. The elves had cleaned up Bowser’s mess, refolded the bath towels and stacked them on the floor.

Mike, wearing only boxer shorts, was stretched out on the bed, propped up on pillows and surrounded by street maps, the newspaper classifieds, and a couple of rental guides. He had reading glasses perched low on his nose. When I leaned over to kiss his bare shoulder I dripped water onto his reading matter.

“Is it raining?” he asked.

“I went for a swim.”

“Naked?”

“Almost. You should have been there.”

“If you’d whistled, I would have been.”

“There was no time,” I said, beginning to shiver. “It was an emergency sort of thing.”

“I can understand that,” he said. “Feel better?”

“Much.” I peeled off my soggy shirt and underwear and started for the bathroom.

“Where’ve you been?” he called after me. “Out.”

Mike’s big terry robe was on a hook in the bathroom. I put it on, wrapped a towel around my hair, and went back to the bed. Still shivering, I slipped under the covers and snuggled up against Mike, stealing his body warmth.

When I had quit squirming and had my cold feet wedged under him, he said, “Out?”

“I went to Etta’s.”

“Guido go?”

“No. I went alone.”

I might as well have hit him across the face. “You went to Etta’s alone?” he exploded.

“Etta does it all the time.”

“Jesus Christ, Maggie. Promise me you won’t ever go there alone again.”

“Okay.”

“I used to work that neighborhood. You have no idea what can happen.”

“I said, okay. I won’t go there alone again.”

“Okay.”

He was still breathing hard when he enveloped me in his arms. He muttered, “Jesus,” a couple of times, most unprayerfully. He needn’t have fussed; I would never go back there alone. I had been scared from the moment I got off the freeway until I got back on it. With reason. I could add up at least four incidents that occurred during the space of an hour that might easily have gone deadly wrong. That’s four possibilities before I gave any thought to car problems or drive-bys. Mike was right: Etta’s neighborhood was no place to wander through alone, at night. I should have known better.

All my moving around under the covers scattered his maps and classifieds. I retrieved a section of ads sliding off my hip: houses and apartments to rent, three bedrooms. He had starred a few.

“Find anything?” I asked.

He shook his head. “The geography’s the tricky part. You want a canyon or ocean view out of the smog belt. Michael has to be within easy commuting distance of Occidental in Eagle Rock. Casey needs access to Pasadena. I don’t want to spend my life on the freeway. The neighborhood has to be reasonably safe. We need at least three bedrooms, but we can’t spend much more than we’ll get in rent for this place, assuming we find a renter. Any ideas?”

“One thought,” I said. “If we find something big enough, I won’t have to rent an office. I miss working from home. When I have to work late, it’s so much easier to keep track of Casey if I’m in the next room instead of down the freeway. God, I’m beginning to hate the freeway.”

With a comer of the towel he dabbed at water on my cheek. “Sounds like regrets.”

“What sort of regrets?” I asked.

“Moving down. You miss your own house.”

“I miss order.” I played with the little patch of hair at the base of his throat. “I wish the elves would come in and move us to a cottage in the woods somewhere, do the laundry, drive Casey around while they’re at it, because the details are beginning to overwhelm me. That’s a long way from regret. Remember what I told you when we decided to live in sin?”

“Let me think.” He rested his chin on my wrapped head. “You said that you wouldn’t care if we had to sleep on army cots in an abandoned airplane hangar, as long as we could wake up together every morning.”

“Something like that,” I said.

“An airplane hangar would give us more space than we have here.”

“Look into it, will you?”

“Yeah.” He gathered the ads and maps and dropped them off the side of the bed.

“How was your meeting with the lieutenant?” I asked as he slid between the sheets and snuggled into me.

He found my breast inside the robe and covered it with his warm hand. “You don’t really want to talk about all that now, do you?”

“Actually, I do,” I said. “What did the lieutenant say?”

Mike frowned and rolled onto his back. “We didn’t get very far. He wanted to go over the case with me, check our procedures. Then he told me to take some time off. I can come with you to Casey’s orientation tomorrow. Maybe we can spend the rest of the day house hunting.”

“Time off? Like a suspension?”

“Not at all like a suspension. Just until things cool off, I’m going to be invisible. One thing you have to understand: As far as the department is concerned, I’m not in any trouble. They’re taking good care of me, because they believe me.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “But if you disappear, won’t it look like the department is hiding something, keeping you under wraps?”

“You know, we did some things differently in the old days when our job was keeping the peace instead of holding teat-to-teats with the bad guys to keep their feelings from getting hurt.”

“That’s a new one.” I laughed, getting a strong visual. Teat to teat was a definite improvement on head to head.

“You know what I mean,” he groused, but not serious about it.

“I know what you mean. You used to kick butt and take names later, or something.”

“Kick ass,” he corrected. “Kick ass.”

I had to ask: “Did you kick Charles Conklin’s ass?”

“I just helped him decide it was time to move out of the neighborhood. The witnesses were little kids and he kept them terrorized. Soon as he was gone, they couldn’t talk fast enough. They saw Conklin at the scene with a gun in his hand. They saw him run away. We had a jail-house snitch to corroborate them and, boom, we nailed Conklin, dead bang.”

“The D.A. says you intimidated the kids.”

“Didn’t have to. The girls came clean, that’s all.”

The girls. Hearing that made something click. Two girls, ages ten or eleven, about fourteen years ago. So, okay, I was a philosophy major, but I can still add about ten and about fourteen. Comes to about twenty-four.

Feeling something between befuddlement and anger, I scooted out of bed to get my bag. I pulled out the newspaper copies and, sitting with my back against Mike’s raised knees, I sorted through them.

“It’s weird, Mike,” I said, hearing sarcasm. I passed him the three short news items about the shooting of Officer Johnson. “I thought that when a police officer was shot everyone made a big fuss about it. Big funeral with thousands of officers in uniform, a eulogy by the chief, grieving family on TV, a motorcade, bagpipes-the whole twenty-dollar package. Johnson got none of that. Why not?”

“A few things.” Mike put his glasses back on and began reading through the articles. “Like I told you, Johnson was off duty and out of uniform when he got it. Second, we thought he might have been up to something dirty.”

“Dirty with Charles Conklin?”

“Don’t know. We didn’t pursue it once we had an arrest. You have any idea what our caseloads are like?”

“But a fellow officer was shot. Surely that meant something. Another thing, there was nothing in the paper about Conklin’s arrest. When did you get him?”

“About a year after the fact. Jail-house snitch came looking for a deal, spilled for us.”

“I’m so disappointed,” I said, nudging him to make room in the bed; he seemed to have spread out. “Where were you great big detectives all that time? Out eating doughnuts?”

“If it had been my case from the beginning, we would have gotten Conklin on day one.” Mike sounded defensive. “The original investigators screwed up on it, got lazy I think, didn’t follow up on leads. They talked to Conklin, but they let him go. The department did a six-month follow-up, then filed the case away for another six months. It probably would have stayed in limbo, except Chuckie Conklin got himself sent to jail on an unrelated charge-crimes against a child-and couldn’t keep his mouth shut. To keep from getting poop-chuted all day like the other pedophiles, he started bragging that he had taken out a cop.”

“Poop-chuted?” I said.

“Think about it.” He set the clippings aside.

“Oh,” I said when I got it. Mike should have come with a glossary of cop-speak. “Was he in jail when you arrested him?”

“No. He was out terrorizing the neighborhood again by the time we bagged him. It was a tough case to make; no one would ID him when he was out loose. Everyone was afraid of him, of his whole damn family-especially the kids. I told you, we helped him decide to move on.”

“You want to explain how you helped him decide?”

Mike yawned. “Aren’t you tired yet?”

“No,” I said. “I just love to listen to you talk. I could stay up all night.”

He looked down at me. “What is this? You have a recorder hidden somewhere?”

“Sho’, you right,” I said in my best imitation of Mike.

“Let me see.” He yanked off the covers and grabbed the front of my robe-his robe-and started to peel it off me. “I know you’ve got a bug in here somewhere. Give it up before this gets ugly.”

“Sometimes I like it ugly,” I said, laughing, trying to hang on to the robe.

“You called it.” His stiff little mustache tickled the inside of my thighs as he searched. And probed. I just threw off the robe and gave him access.

Mike is a genius with his hands and his tongue-expertise that comes from vast experience. After all of the wild and crazy things we have done with and to each other, he can still amaze me, make my eyes roll back in my head. But that night, though Mike was in peak form, I couldn’t clear my mind enough to be of much help. After a few minutes he figured something was wrong and raised himself. He looked at me, his face framed between my knees.

“Where did I lose you?” he asked.

“I’m confused.” I reached out for a handful of his hair. “I’m trying to put things together. I have two piles of information that should flow together, but they simply do not seem to exist on the same plane of truth. They will not merge.”

“Someone lie to you?”

“You.” I sat up to look him square on, feeling angry and confused. “I know you lie to me all the time about things you’ve done on the job-you pretty things up so I won’t judge you.”

“That isn’t lying. If you haven’t been on the streets, there’s no way you can understand what goes down.”

“Maybe,” I said. I had backed up from him, out of his zone of magnetism. I tried to, anyway. As mad as I was, I still wanted to hold him. Realizing that made me even angrier. “Maybe not. Right now I need you to tell me the truth. The names of the little girl witnesses? They wouldn’t be LaShonda DeBevis and Hanna Rhodes, would they?”

He sighed.

“You’re using me again, Mike. I don’t like the way that feels.”

“Me, too.”

“You better explain.”

He sat naked in front of me, looking shamed. And gorgeous. I think that if he hadn’t been naked I would have been a whole lot angrier. Mike doesn’t leave himself vulnerable, ever. If he could sit there completely exposed, then he felt safe with me. That is, whatever he’d done wasn’t so bad it would make me turn on him.

“Just spill it, Mike,” I said, sitting cross-legged in front of him, our knees touching.

“I’m under orders,” he said. “I can’t talk to anyone who was involved in the case.”

I nodded. “The department is reinvestigating for you, but you can’t play.”

“Not exactly reinvestigating. The department is going over procedure, making sure we did things right the first time. That’s all. But I want more. The D.A. and this asshole evangelical private eye, Leroy Burgess, are trying to get a convicted murderer out of prison on a technicality. The city doesn’t give a shit if he gets out, as long as we don’t come off looking too bad. Doesn’t anyone but me care that he’s guilty?”

“You want me to talk to the witnesses?”

“In the course of this project you have going, if you were to talk to them, that would be good.”

“What is it you want me to find out from them?”

“Just if the girls are okay. If you can find them and they’re okay, that’s enough for me.”

“No message?”

“No. Except maybe watch out. The D.A. said he has new affidavits from them saying they were coerced all those years ago. If they were ever coerced, it was when they signed those new affidavits. This whole thing really stinks, Mag. I worry that LaShonda and Hanna might be in some trouble.”

“I’ll do what I can. Just don’t lie to me anymore.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You already said that.”

“I don’t know what else to say. Problem is, I’m used to taking care of my own problems. I’m not good at asking for help, but I can’t get inside alone this time. Since you were in the neighborhood, I hoped maybe you’d knock on a few doors for me.”

“You have to say, please Maggie, give me a hand.”

“I just did.”

“You’re some tough guy, Flint,” I said, softened by his anguish. “You’ve got skin like a baby, but you’re some tough guy.”

He tried to get up an attitude. “I don’t have skin like a baby.”

“Yes you do,” I said, nuzzling his abdomen. “And dimples on your vanilla ice cream butt.”

“Ass,” he said, breaking into a smile, getting hard again. “And no, I don’t.”

But he does.