Bad Intent

Chapter 18

I was right about the cabbage roses, great big pink ones with dark green leaves. Lying under the ugly wallpaper and the many layers of paint slathered on the original woodwork, under the army-blanket-gray carpet, I saw a beautiful turnof-the-century California craftsman-style house ready to be rescued.

When Mike pulled back the heavy damask drapes in the living room, I was sold. One entire wall was floor-to-ceiling glass doors that opened onto a brick patio shaded by an enormous avocado tree.

The house had been built around three sides of the patio and every first floor room had similar tall glass doors. The wing to the right was a single empty room large enough for a pool table or a grand piano. The left wing held the kitchen and dining room. Beyond the patio a lush, sloping lawn and a formal rose garden separated the house from a free-standing cottage and the garage.

“Bowser would be happy,” Mike said.

“We’ll take down the drapes,” I said. “They spoil the windows.”

“If we decide to take the house,” he said.

I said, “Uh huh,” and walked out across the patio to explore the kitchen.

I was already in love, so maybe I didn’t see things with an appropriately critical eye. The kitchen looked as though it hadn’t been touched for probably twenty-five years, and then touched lightly. I thought that all it needed to be functional were a microwave, some fresh tile grout, and Windex to clean the patio doors. Mike had some questions about the old copper plumbing. I left him with his head under the sink and wandered upstairs by myself.

What attracted me to the old house was clean design, the feeling of openness created by tall ceilings and windows everywhere. All of the rooms were large spaces that seemed to flow around the open center. Even the upstairs bedrooms.

There were two bedroom suites, both with decadent green and mauve art-deco tile bathrooms complete with claw-footed tubs. Both suites also had adjoining sitting rooms with balconies that overlooked the yard. I thought we could easily convert one of the sitting rooms into a third bedroom so that Michael and Casey would share a bathroom. Though maybe sharing a bathroom with Casey was asking too much of anyone.

The master suite was a few square feet larger and just a little more opulent than the other rooms. The big discovery there was the small granite fireplace opposite the huge bathtub. Right off, I thought of a few possibilities.

I went out to the landing that overlooked the entry, watched the gathering dusk wash the house in soft, blue evening light. When I couldn’t see the cabbage roses any more, it was easier to visualize the house as it would be when the walls and the floors had been stripped, when our furniture was in place, our pictures and treasures installed. It seemed a natural merger.

Mike came out of the small powder room tucked under the stairs and looked up at me, his hair bright silver in the last glow of daylight.

“Plumbing is old,” he said, drawing together his brows. “I’m not sure about the wiring, either. Power has been off for over a year.”

“Come up,” I said.

“It’s dark.”

“See what I found.”

“The electrical service isn’t our problem,” he said as he climbed the stairs toward me, grousing all the way. “Unless it screws up. All your video stuff, the kids’ computers and stereos, a microwave-the wiring was never meant to handle that kind of a load.”

When he got to the top step, I grabbed a handful of his shirtfront and, walking backward, pulled him along the hall. “None of that matters, baby.”

“You don’t care if the whole place leaks and shorts out?”

“No. We’ll fix it.” I led him into what would be our bedroom. A warm, fragrant breeze blew in through the open windows and swept the upper branches of the avocado tree against the side of the house, a brisk sound like an old lady with a new broom.

We went over to the window and looked out across the lawn. When I took a deep breath and sighed, Mike looked down at me and smiled. “You like it?”

“The bathtub is big enough for two.”

“But if the pipes leak…”

“We’ll heat water in the fireplace.”

He turned again to the windows. “I took a look at the little house in back. It’s just a single room with a bath. No kitchen. If we update the wiring, you could use it for an office.”

“There’s a good room downstairs for an office. If the little house is nice, maybe Michael would like to make bachelor quarters out of it. Give him more privacy.”

“Hmmm,” Mike said. “Hmmm.”

“You could put up Casey’s barre in the extra room up here. Then everyone would have plenty of space.”

This time when he said, “Hmmm,” he was nodding.

I leaned against him and he felt so solid. Solid like the house.

I’ve never been able to keep my hands off Mike, not from the first day I met him. I cannot rationalize the chemistry thing between us. From the beginning, it was, frankly, something new and damned surprising for me.

At some point in history, I must have felt passion for my ex-husband. Otherwise, how would we have gotten together? But by the time we reached the point of splitting up, I could not remember ever feeling anything for him stronger than vague and constant annoyance.

Time does play tricks on the memory. Just the same, I knew for an absolute certainty that the raw, hungry lust I had for Mike Flint was, for me, an unprecedented affliction.

I reached up under his shirt to find bare skin. “Don’t you think we should baptize our room?”

He laughed softly. “What did you have in mind?”

“Make love to me.”

“Should I go down and get the handcuffs out of the car?” I pulled his shirt off over his head.

“Sure. I’ll cuff you to the balcony railing and have my way with you.”

“You got it backwards.” Mike was a wrestler in high school. I reached for his belt buckle, but before I saw his move coming, somehow I landed on the floor pinned beneath him, nose to nose. “I don’t need cuffs to hold you down.”

“Right,” I said, breathless. “But I hoped you had more in mind that holding me down.”

He did, and we well and fully initiated the room, blessed the house. Anointed ourselves in accumulated rug dust. When we got back to the condo in the Valley, we looked as if we had dug right into the grime of restoration. Made a commitment to it.

Michael and Casey were in the dining room doing homework when we passed through. They exchanged scandalized glances when they saw us.

“Where’s Sly?” I asked.

“We drove him home,” Casey said. “How’s the house?”

“Beautiful,” I said. “You can ride your bike to school. Mike thinks he can have it ready to move into in about a week. Michael, do you think you can tolerate sleeping on the couch that much longer?”

“I think so.” He seemed tremendously relieved by the announcement. I wondered, if we hadn’t found a place so quickly, how long would his charity and good humor have lasted?

Bowser crawled out from under the table, from his usual perch next to Casey, and began sniffing Mike and me. His tail wagged delighted approval with the variety of smells we had brought him to sample.

“Can we go rent a video?” Casey asked.

“Not on a school night,” I said.

“I’m bored.”

“Read a book. Take a walk. Come for a swim with me.”

She looked up at me with utter disdain. And so did the dog. “I finished my homework.”

“Congratulations,” I said, kissing the top of her freshly washed head. “I have some work to do in my office. If you don’t want to swim, maybe you’d like to come with me and be useful.”

I had not tempted her.

Mike said, “Casey, after I get cleaned up, I need to go to the mall, pick up some things. You haven’t seen the mall yet. Would you like to come along?”

Casey looked from him to me, her face happy again. “Mom?”

“If you want to go, go.”

Ten minutes later, Mike’s hair still wet from his shower, they went. It took me a few minutes longer to get washed and changed. The house was quiet when I was ready, some unedited tapes tucked into my bag. I found Michael stretched out on the couch with headphones on.

I shouted his name.

He took off his headphones. “What?”

“I’m going to spend a couple of hours editing an interview. Would you like to come?”

He nestled down among the cushions. “Another time.”

I understood. He was enjoying some blessed aloneness while he could.

All the way down Ventura Boulevard, I was enjoying the prospect of having my work space at home again. No more commuting, no more rent. I would be more accessible for Casey, especially with her school only a couple of miles from the house. Best of all, I was thinking as I pulled into the nearly deserted parking lot, I wouldn’t be working alone at night.

I went upstairs first to check my studio slot for the following night. A special-education expert named Linda Westman was coming in to discuss the relationship between learning disabilities and growing up in a war zone. I picked up my mail-most of it junk-stopped at the ice cream machine before I went down the hall to my office.

The hall walls needed paint. The carpet needed cleaning. The whole building was an unloved, transient haven. I had never bothered to notice before. Now that I was a short-timer, I saw it all with a more objective eye. With pleasure, as soon as arrangements were made for the house, I would call the rental agency and tell them they could start looking for a new tenant.

When I put my key in the door, my first thought was that even the locks were cheap; sloppy works. But I had installed new locks of my own. Good ones.

Sometimes we have to listen to that little inner voice that may have picked up on some tiny nuance; something about the easy way the new locks turned set off the alarms. I pushed the door open and hit the lights without stepping inside.

My office, at first, seemed exactly as I had left it the day before. But things had been touched: The middle drawer of the old wooden desk had to be lifted just so to make it close all the way. Someone who didn’t know that had last closed my drawer. The shelved tapes were meticulously aligned, the shooting notes on the blotter were stacked with the corners nice and even. The usual dust was there, the trash had not been emptied. I am not meticulous about straight corners and aligned edges, the night cleaning crew had not been in to straighten anything.

The real clincher that set off the adrenaline rush was, the message light on my answering machine was not flashing. I took a pencil out of my bag and used the eraser end to punch the replay button. The day’s usual collection of messages began spieling out.

Right away, and using the pencil to dial, I called Michael.

“Check the doors,” I told him. “Make sure everything is locked. Until your dad gets back, don’t let anyone, anyone in.”

Then I paged Mike. While I stood by the telephone waiting for him to call me back, I saw that the power light on one of the tape players was glowing. I pushed play and watched Etta on the courthouse steps during the three minutes, twelve seconds-according to the VCR timer-that it took Mike to get to a telephone.

“What?” he said when I answered his call.

“Someone was in my office.”

“Is it tossed?”

“No,” I said. “Barely touched. Whoever it was put a tape in the VCR, listened to my phone messages, went through my desk and the tape files. I don’t know whether anything is missing. Or added. It’s damn spooky.”

“You’re there now?”

“Yes. What should I do?”

“Bolt the door and wait for me.”

I used the time to make another call. Lana Howard was at home.

“What’s the progress?” she asked me.

“Everything’s great,” I said, hauling up enthusiasm for her benefit. “A film always needs time to find its stride. At this point, we are in full striding glory. A few in-studio interviews and a follow-up or two, and then we’re ready to give it form. It will, I say with all modesty, knock your socks off.”

I was watching Etta on the screen again as I talked. “The reason I called, though, is, something interesting has come up in the process and I want to run it by you.”

“Sure.” She sounded eager.

“This Charles Conklin business?”

“Yes. Great story.” Sounded like real enthusiasm. “Really great. So many human interest elements there.”

“You don’t know the half of it,” I said. Her enthusiasm seemed to be that of a convert, and my job would be the difficult one of re-education. Lana first, the entire viewing public next. “And the half you don’t know involves Baron Marovich, the murder of a prostitute, the shooting of a cop, media manipulation-stop me when I’ve peaked your interest-high-level perjury, breaking and entering and, if we stretch it, child abuse.”

“I don’t know, Maggie. How long is this piece?”

“I can do it in sixty seconds. I can do it in sixty minutes. Depends on what you want. Before you make a decision, though, you need to know that someone is after my data. My office was broken into this evening. I have a feeling that the sooner I get something on the air, the safer I’m going to be.”

“Really?” Dramatic expression. “Are you in danger?”

I fudged here. “I have been followed. Guido was doped. He’s in the hospital right now. My gut feeling is, someone is desperate to stop certain information from being made public. Now, you’ve been in this business almost as long as I have. You know that the more someone doesn’t want you to give some piece of information, the more that information needs to be broadcast. We’re not talking personal dirt here. We’re talking misuse of the public trust. And the election is six weeks away.”

“How soon can you have something for me?”

“If I can use the network facilities and borrow an editor, I can have something that will singe the paint off your nose by noon tomorrow.”

She didn’t need to think it over. “Just tell me what you need. If you can have something for me by noon tomorrow, I’ll schedule a lunch meeting and screen it for the editorial board.”

After good-bye, I turned off Etta, ejected her tape, and slipped it into my bag.

I heard Mike and Casey coming down the hall. When I opened the door, they looked as if they had been in a foot race. They surveyed the office, both of them disappointed that there was nothing to see. Mike was carrying a large fishing tackle box.

“They were here after seven o’clock,” I said. “The last message on my machine was from Guido’s mother giving me an update on his condition.”

“How’s Guido?”

“Asleep, but okay.”

Mike had opened his tackle box. He took out a large soft-bristle brush, a plastic bottle filled with dark graphite powder, and a roll of wide clear tape. With these tools, he lifted prints from the buttons on the answering machine and the VCR, from the light switch and the door knob. Then he took out an ink pad and made a set of prints from me and a set from Casey.

“If you find a stranger’s prints,” I said, “what will you do with them?”

“Run them through AFIS.”

Sounded like a garden pest, but it was the state’s computerized fingerprint identification system. Anyone with prints on file with the state, from school teachers to convicted ax murderers, was in the computer.

Mike lifted more than a dozen clear prints. Most of them were mine or Casey’s. The four or five that did not compare, he put into a small brown envelope and tucked into his tackle box.

“I’ll follow you home,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “But, if you’ll be okay watching over Casey and Michael tonight, I have some work to do at the network production facility. I need to pick up some material from home, then I’m gone.”

“How long do you think?”

“My deadline is noon tomorrow.”

He was upset, maybe angry. “All night? What are you doing?”

“I’m putting together a teaser for the evening news broadcast. The D.A. says he has new affidavits from the Conklin witnesses. But no one has seen them. I have affidavits of another sort, and I want to get them on the air as soon as I can, before this business gets any uglier. Breaking into my office was going too far. I have a bad feeling that whoever was in here tonight knew I was occupied at seven o’clock. I don’t keep regular office hours. No one knows when I’ll drop in.” I glanced at Casey and felt hot all over. If someone knew where I was, they probably knew where Casey was, too. And Michael.

Mike said, “What are you going to do?”

“I’m not sure until I get into it, but I’ll put together a sixty-second package for broadcast. Maybe it will flush out something useful.”

Mike reached over to take my arm, bring me in closer. “You shouldn’t go out alone. I’ll call someone.”

At ten, I had Casey tucked in and my materials gathered into a big box. Mike waited outside with me until my escort arrived, a black and white unit with two uniformed officers, then he went inside and I heard the deadbolt shoot home behind him.

My escort followed me back through Burbank to the network studios. Their spotlight saw me all the way into the building.

Lana Howard was waiting for me at the security desk. She made a crack about the lengths I would go to one-up the usual limos the talent used, but I saw that any doubts she had about the gravity of my new project evaporate when she saw my police tag. I wasn’t about to tell her that if Mike wanted me to have an escort, I would have an escort, whether I was coming in to draw mustaches on the portraits of the studio execs in the foyer or to save the universe from certain destruction. She was impressed, and that was enough.