Bad Intent

Chapter 17

My family, plus one, Sly again, were just finishing dinner when I walked in. Sly had his hair combed back in imitation of Michael, his idol.

“How were things in math today?” I asked Sly.

As always, he turned his foxy face to Michael before he said anything. “Hangin’ in.”

“How are things at home?”

“Food’s shit, but okay.”

“He’s eating regular.” Michael tweaked the boy’s flat midsection. “Look at this belly bag.”

Sly, delighted by the attention, slapped Michael’s hand away. “Faggot.”

Mike reached up for my hand. “Hungry?”

“No.” In the back of my throat I still had the smell of the huevos rancheros Guido had deposited on his floor. I got a diet soda from the refrigerator and sat down at the table between Mike and Casey. “Casey, how was the first day?”

“Good.” She wore sweatpants over her leotard, her hair was still trapped in a tight ballerina bun. Bowser lay on the floor under the table, resting his head on her foot. “My geometry teacher is a major jerk, but the rest of them are okay. Dance is going be really, really hard. But good.”

“I hope so,” I said.

“The L.A. Ballet Company is coming next week for Nutcracker tryouts,” she said, enthusiasm gaining momentum. “I don’t know if I’m going to try out. Mischa says I’m too tall for the Clara part. Everything else is so boring. The snowflakes and sugarplums are really lame. Think I’ll wait until the Joffrey comes in January.”

“Auditions for an L.A. show, I hope? I don’t want you on a tour for another year or two. Or three. Or ten.”

“We’ll see,” she said, picking up her dinner plate. “They probably won’t want me anyway.” Her tone said this was only token self-deprecation. Lack of confidence is not one of Casey’s problems. With Bowser following her every movement, she pirouetted to the sink and rinsed her dishes.

“Wish they’d let me have a dog.” Reverently, Sly stroked the dog’s back. “Hey, Michael, how come you don’t have a cool dog like this?”

“Why do I need a dog, squirt, when I have you?”

“Faggot,” Sly giggled.

“So, Michael,” I said, “were you able to petition the class you needed?”

“No. I ended up with Asian lit just to fill my schedule.” He glanced at Casey, gave me a sardonic smile. “Teacher’s a major jerk. But the rest of them are okay.”

I laughed. “Glad to hear it.”

Casey rolled her eyes. “You are so funny, Michael. Not!”

“Can you play volleyball on your toes?” he asked her.

She sneered. “Of course not.”

“Can you play at all?”

“I’m okay. Good enough to beat you.”

“Prove it.” He gathered his dinner things and stacked them in the sink. “There’s a game out back tonight. Show me your stuff.”

Sly, not to be neglected, chirped up, “I can beat you both.”

“Oh yeah?” Michael wadded the foil from his baked potato into a ball and flicked it to Casey. “See if you can get it from her, squirt.”

In the small kitchen they played keep-away. Casey and Michael, who towered over poor little Sly, teased, feigned, mercilessly held the foil ball out of his reach.

Michael passed high to Casey. She reached for it. Sly hit the back of her knees, pinched her butt, and, when she fumbled the ball to swat him, intercepted the ball and was out the back door with it.

“You little creep.” Casey flew out in pursuit, with Bowser, barking, close on her heels.

Mike reached back from his chair and snagged Michael’s arm before he could get away. “We’re going to go look at a house in South Pasadena before it gets dark. You interested?”

“Can’t. Sly’s still flunking math, needs a tutorial.” He jogged out to catch up with the others.

Mike watched him with a misty-eyed wistfulness saved for transitory pleasures, moments that will too soon pass. He sighed and turned in his seat, smiled at me.

“Quite a kid,” he said.

“The best.” I started picking at his dinner salad. “What’s this about a house?”

“Old place in South Pasadena, belonged to Harriman’s grandmother. Remember Harriman? Works Hollywood vice. So, the house has been vacant for a while. Some snag in probate. He’s offering us a break on the rent if I help him do some work on it, get it ready to sell eventually.”

I tried to hold back mental pictures of some grandma’s dark old house with cabbage-rose wallpaper and antique plumbing. You can live with almost any inconvenience for a short time, but a short time didn’t interest me. I asked, “How long can we have it?”

“Long as we want.”

“Until you retire?”

“Long as we want.”

“Cozy arrangement,” I said.

He leaned back. “I told you, we look after each other.”

I decided to reserve judgment as to how well they looked after each other until I had seen the house.

Mike hadn’t flnished his pork chop. I set aside his empty salad bowl and picked up the chop. He watched me with a dreamy sort of look on his Bogart face.

I said, “How was your day, cupcake?”

“Stimulating. I did the laundry and caught up on my soaps. Drove the carpool, did the marketing, fixed dinner. Usual routine. How was your day?”

“Routine,” I said, moving on to the ends of his baked potato. “I interviewed a murderer in Juvenile Hall, a Black Muslim in the ghetto, and an old psycho cop. Watched a TV taping. Guido you know about.”

“Guido I know about.” Mike picked up the empty serving dishes and turned away from me toward the sink, but not before I saw something dark cross his face: fear, despair, frustration, they all seem to come out of the same emotional pocket. For the last few days, ever since Conklin’s name came up on the news, Mike had become moody, unusually changeable. And quiet.

Mike was scraping dinner scraps into the garbage disposal when I came up behind him and put my arms around him, pressed my hands against his flat middle and my cheek against his hard back.

“Guido’s okay,” I said.

“I know.”

“And I’m okay.”

“I know.”

“It’s you I’m worried about. What makes your face so sad?”

He turned off the water and the disposal and stayed with his back to me, his damp hands covering mine. He said, “I can’t stand being locked out. I want to go back to work. If I had a day-just one single day-I’d get this pile of manure case bagged and delivered and out of our lives.”

“I’m sure you would. But you just told me your people look after each other. Trust them to bag your manure this time. Trust me.”

“There are a lot of things I like you to do for me,” he said in his tough-guy mode. “Working my case just doesn’t happen to be one of them.”

“I’m not working your case,” I said.

“Could have fooled me.” From the mail pile in the corner, next to the basket of market coupons and take-out menus, he pulled a manila envelope like the one Hector had given me a couple of nights earlier. This one was thicker. A yellow sticky note on the front of it said, “Mike, give this to Maggie. Let’s get together soon. Hec.”

“Mash notes?” I said.

“Take a look.”

The envelope had copies of Wyatt Johnson’s personnel file and the police report of his murder, about fifty pages stapled together. The cover sheet on the report warned, “Confidential. Operations-Headquarters Bureau. The Chief of Police considers this report to be highly confidential. Administrative use is limited to concerned staff and command personnel of the Los Angeles Police Department. Any other use is forbidden by the District Attorney. This report is not to be reproduced or copied. This report has a registered distribution.”

“Sounds intimidating,” I said. “Is it routine warning?”

He shook his head. “Only on officer-involved shootings and internal affairs cases. This is strictly in-house info.”

“How much trouble can Hector get into for bringing it out?” I asked.

“Lose his job. His pension. Wife’ll probably walk. That’s why this report doesn’t leave your hands. It doesn’t show up in a movie.”

“I didn’t ask Hector for anything,” I said. “What does he expect me to do with this?”

“I wouldn’t know. He left the envelope on the doorstep and took off. Now you have the files, suppose you read them.”

Wyatt Johnson’s personnel folder was interesting only because I had never seen a police employment file before. Johnson had graduated near the top of his police academy class in physical tests and on the firing range. Academically, he was in the lower third. After his rookie period on patrol, he transferred to traffic out of Central Bureau.

“Not a go-getter,” Mike said. “Traffic is easy duty.”

“He had good evaluations,” I said, reading through them. “Courteous, prompt, and clean. A note here from an accident victim praising his helpfulness and professionalism. A genuine paragon of police virtue.”

“Not quite,” Mike said. “I see he got beefed. He drew five days for hitting the hole.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“He was caught sleeping on the job and got suspended for five days without pay. It’s no wonder. See these?” He pulled out half-a-dozen work permits. “He was king of the part-time job. Until he got caught sleeping and had all his permits revoked, he had the okay to moonlight at, count ‘em, six security jobs.”

“Not all at the same time,” I said.

“No. Probably worked more than one at a time, though. Look at his personal data. He’s a kid, twenty-four years old. He’s buying a house, buying a car, has a wife and baby. Keeping up with that takes a helluva lot more income than a rookie cop salary. If he’s like the rest of them, he works his eight-hour shift in uniform, then he goes straight to his next job and works eight more. On his days off, he works a third job. Doesn’t leave much time for sleeping.”

“Or for wife and baby. Did you have part-time jobs?”

“Shit, yes. Used to work morning watch, get off around seven in the morning. If I had court I’d find a place to grab a nap until I was called-sleep in my car, any empty office. One time a bailiff let me into a courtroom during lunch break and I slept on the judge’s bench. I’d collect overtime days doing court, take the days off and work security for the movie studios on location shoots.

“Most of the time, I’d go from my patrol shift straight to my next job, work five or six hours, then I’d go pick up Michael and coach his baseball team-I coached him until he was in high school. Eat dinner, take a nap, then go back to work and start all over again. I’d never get more than three, four hours of sleep in a stretch.”

“Hard on a marriage.”

“Too hard.” Dewy eyes again. “I wanted my family to have everything I never had. Nice house in a good neighborhood, new cars, the best schools. I wanted my son’s mother to be home for him. My problem was, I didn’t really know how to make that happen. Had no model to work from.”

“Maybe not,” I said. “But you did a great job. Michael is a wonderful man. You’re a wonderful father.”

He had a crooked, almost shy smile. “You should hear my ex’s version before you say that.”

“No thanks.” I turned back to the files.

“I worked nearly every waking hour, but I never made her happy.”

“Maybe if you’d been home more.”

“Once I had a mortgage, I couldn’t get off that treadmill.”

“I know how that is. Sometimes you have to make a leap, even if you can’t see where you’ll land. I did it once.” I was picking at the remains in the salad bowl. “During the last few seasons that I worked network news, I pulled down six figures a year for reading copy off a Teleprompter. I persuaded myself I was no better than a whore-tease up my hair, paint my face, and try to give the viewing audience a hard-on so they wouldn’t turn the channel before the commercials came on. Sounds ridiculous when I say it now, but that’s how I felt. So, I did the noble thing, and I quit.

“The first year I was an independent, I earned minus forty-thousand dollars and loved every minute of it. We nearly lost our house. My husband didn’t make the leap with me, though. He was so worried about impending fiscal disaster that he started losing his hair. He couldn’t get it up for a while, either. And you know what?”

“I’m afraid of what you’ll tell me,” he said. “But what?”

“That year I quit, Scotty made nearly two hundred thousand dollars all by himself. You’d think it would be enough to buy groceries, wouldn’t you?”

“You’d think.”

“Which brings us back to the point here. It doesn’t matter what you earn, it’s what you’re used to spending. Now, look at this nice young cop, Wyatt. Surely he and his family had become accustomed to a certain standard. How did he cover his obligations when he couldn’t work overtime?”

“Probably did what everyone else does. Cut back, put the wife to work, lie about the number of extra hours you work. Why? What are you suggesting?”

“Nothing. But it bears looking into. It still bothers me that that boy scout was in a public bathroom in a crummy neighborhood, in the middle of the night.”

“Maybe he was so worried about fiscal disaster that his hair started falling out and he couldn’t get it up.” Mike started to tickle me, holding me with one strong hand so I couldn’t get away. It had more to do with control than with fun. “Maybe he was looking for a hit man because his wife kept bringing up shit that bore looking into. Maybe he had to pee.”

I wasn’t laughing when I got away from him. My sides hurt from his tickling. “Mike, did you ever get beefed?”

“Not for sleeping on the job.” His voice sounded tight. I knew I was treading the line. I didn’t know how to phrase the next part of the question on my mind because I was afraid of the answer. Mike answered before I had to figure out an angle.

“I was a street cop for a lot of years, baby. Things go down that you can’t always handle according to the book. I did what I had to do to control the situation, keep innocent people from taking too many lumps, weed out some of the creeps. So, yeah, I got beefed.”

“For excessive force?” I was pushing it.

“That’s what the sheet says.” He gave it to me in slow, white-hot speech. “I gave my baton to a rape victim once and let her beat the crap out of her attacker. I took two weeks on that one. I broke my flashlight over a guy’s head when he drew a gun on me. Judge said I should have shot him and threw the case out. I got into my share of fights. A blow by blow make you happy? Is that what you want?”

I had backed up against the sink, as far away as I could get without leaving the room. He was big, he was fierce. Any kid in the room would be reduced to blubbering and tears-I understood that right away. Grown men and women would think twice about taking him on. He could scare me if I let him. But I faced him down, moved into him because it was all wind and fire. Mike would never touch me, that I knew that for an absolute certainty.

I said, “There’s only one thing I want, Mike.”

“Let’s have it.”

“I want you.”