Bad Intent

Chapter 26

Fire lit the sky for miles. Like a giant pointer, a fat white plume reached up out of its center and disappeared into the cloud cover. Six helicopters circled the area, shining their big spots down into the middle of the red glow, saying, “Here it is.” We could see exactly where the fire was. The problem was getting to it.

The freeways for miles on all sides were nearly impassable, the surface streets were at gridlock. We were near Overland Avenue, somewhere on the Westside, trying to find a way through. Mike blasted his horn in frustration before he gave up and veered off to drive the shoulder. He bounced us through potholes, over road debris and various car parts. It was uncomfortable, scary as hell, but we did progress past the solid, unmoving mass of cars.

“You weren’t friends?” I asked, holding on to the dash.

Mike frowned as if he’d swallowed something distasteful. “No. He’s a one-way kind of guy. I don’t think he has any friends. Something about him, the things he talks about, I guess-I don’t know. I worked a tough case with him, but I kept my distance.”

“What kind of things?”

“Schemes.” He nearly sideswiped a station wagon to avoid a crater. When the Blazer stopped bouncing, he took a breath. “Always involved in some sort of deal, gonna get rich, gonna blow town. Nothing ever seemed to pan out, though. And he was a lush.”

I was trying to relax; the worst thing you can do in a collision is brace yourself-snaps your bones. I asked, “Was he competent on the job?”

“Maybe he was once, or he wouldn’t have been promoted. He knew what to do, but he’d get drunk, lose track of things. I was new to the division and he sort of attached himself to me. Probably because no one else would work with him.”

“I read the Conklin investigation files. I didn’t see his name on much of it.”

“Totally H.U.A. all the time.”

I said, “I forgot my glossary.”

He risked taking his eyes off the road long enough to give me his tough-guy smirk. “Head Up Ass.”

I said, “Oh.”

“It was a piece-of-shit case to begin with. The trail was a year old. Jerry asks to be assigned to do the year review, the lieutenant doesn’t trust him, but he has to give him something to keep him busy. So the lieutenant says, sure, take it on, and here’s the new kid on the block-me-to be your bun boy. I knew Jerry didn’t expect a damn thing from me. For damn sure he never thought I would pull it together.”

There was open space in the middle of the next intersection. Mike, holding down the horn, blasted through it to effect a left turn. We took a lot of the evil eye and not a few middle-finger salutes, but we made it.

When we were back on the shoulder, I said, “There is a body?”

“Yes.”

I picked up the telephone. “What’s Michael’s number?”

“Why?”

“I have to talk to him.”

“He’s okay, Maggie. Calm down. Michael and his mom went up to her folks’ place in Arrowhead.”

“How do you know?” I asked.

“I already called.”

Mike rode the center line down Rose Avenue, crossed Sepulveda in the no-man’s land between the end of a red light and the flashing on of a green. Fire trucks, police cars, paramedics vehicles, and news vans blocked the street, and we were still two blocks from the equipment storage yard where Jerry Kelsey kept his trailer. Where flames still shot ten feet into the air.

By a combination of skill and dumb luck, Mike got in among the official vehicles without major damage and found a place to stop.

I was out of the Blazer and running toward the storage lot, ankle-deep in dirty run-off water, a fine spray falling from overhead, when Ralph Faust grabbed me, spun me around.

“Hold on, Maggie,” he said. His grip hurt my wrist.

I said, “Let go.”

Through the fence I could see flaming oil barrels and construction equipment, the hole in the ground where the gasoline storage tank had been. Jerry Kelsey’s trailer was nothing more than a molten mass, a black smear on the gravel.

I smelled booze on Ralph’s breath. He might have smelled wine on mine. Mike had been beeped at the beginning of our second bottle of champagne. In the middle of the argument.

“We did this, you know,” Ralph said. “We started it.”

“What do I hear?” I asked, cruel sarcasm in there. “Sudden compunction? You never turned around before, saw the human wreckage in your wake?”

“Don’t be mad at me.”

“Have to be mad at somebody.” I was looking around for Mike. Finally, I spotted him talking to the coroner’s people. I pulled against Ralph’s grip, but he held firm, drew me against him. I heard heavy sighing in his chest.

I looked up into his face. I whispered, “It’s only a fire. You’ll be all right. Let me go.”

But he seemed unable to comprehend.

“Was Kelsey in there?” I asked.

From his pocket he took a shoe, a little navy pump, about a size five or six. The toe was blackened, the leather was wet. I took the shoe from him. Casey hadn’t worn anything that small since she was in about the fourth grade; the thought a reflex. My daughter is always my first thought when something scary happens.

“Where did you get this?” I asked him.

“I was standing over there by the gate with a film crew, and it just floated by.” He pointed with his free hand. “Just floated by.”

I broke then and ran to Mike. He caught me, too, but more to hold me away than to keep me. I offered the little shoe to him. I said, “Where is Jennifer Miller?”

Mike looked over at the technician leaning against the coroner’s empty van. “One body?”

“So far,” was her response.

“Male or female?”

“Don’t know,” the woman said. “Firemen saw it inside the trailer, but it’s still too hot to get a better look. No hurry. Victim isn’t going anywhere-charred beyond, from the description. Just hope there’s enough left to x-ray. Have to wait.”

Mike took me aside, walked me back toward his car. “Did you hear her? You have to wait. I need to talk to some people. Can I trust you to stay put for a while?”

I dropped back. “Did you say stay put?”

He sighed. “Just don’t get hurt, okay?”

“I’ll try.”

“Jeez,” he muttered, and jogged off toward the police command post.

Staying on the perimeter, away from the firehoses, I walked back to the news vans, found the one sent out by the network I had been working with. Jack Riley was inside the cab, talking on the phone, watching the fire in air-conditioned comfort. He climbed out when he saw me.

“When did you get here?” I asked.

He shrugged, “Five, ten minutes ago. Lot of fuss isn’t it? I just don’t get the big deal about a fire. I mean, it’s nice and bright-good color-but they’re doing prime-time interrupts for some bulldozers and a watchman? Probably started it himself smoking in bed, or tossed a butt in the wrong place. The petro people are going to dump their load on the oil barrels in a minute, then it will be all over.”

“Jack, don’t you know who the watchman is?”

He toned right down, opened up, ready to rethink things. “Should I know?”

“Jerry Kelsey. One of the detectives in the Conklin case.”

“Oh.” With some enthusiasm. “He’s the corpse?”

“Don’t know. Adds a little fuel to the story, though, doesn’t it?”

“I’ll forgive the ghoulish attempt at humor.” Jack was thinking fast, as usual, putting something together. “You’ve got a handle on the deep background, don’t you? I mean, you knew this guy.”

“I met him. I used a picture that I took right there in front of his trailer in the piece that ran last night.”

“Now we have a story I like. I want you on camera, Maggie.” His new enthusiasm moved us toward the film crew across the street. They were just standing around, gossiping with the weekend news talent.

“What do you want me to do?” I asked him.

“Give me a break.” He gave me a shoulder nudge. “You know what to do. Let’s just do it before we lose the fire.”

Jack had a short verbal scuffle with the talent, who was getting one of his first shots at a prime-time story out of the fire. He was young and smooth-looking, and eager. He suggested that instead of turning everything over to me, he interview me, though he hadn’t a clue what questions to ask. It was his turn, dammit, and he wasn’t going to give it up.

“He’s right, Jack,” I said. “You’re screwing with his resume. This is his fire to report, and I’m an interloper. What if he introduces me, nods his head here and there, and closes? We’d all be happy, right?”

That’s the way we did it. The two of us stood in tight, with the camera three yards in front of us, the fire about sixty yards behind us. Even at that distance, I could feel some of its heat. The entire scene was lit red.

After the intro-he did a good job, said everything I told him to-I gave a brief rundown on Jerry Kelsey, retired cop, and why he lived in the trailer, how I met him in relation to the Conklin case. I was careful to mention Marovich, twice, getting in a dig about his tight race for reelection.

Then I laid what I hoped was the bombshell, peppering it shamelessly with attention-getting buzzwords: “Twice this week, fatal tragedy has struck among those originally involved in the Conklin murder conviction.

“During the early hours of Tuesday morning, young Hanna Rhodes, a witness to the slaying, was cold-bloodedly gunned down in the Southeast Los Angeles neighborhood where she grew up. Locked out of the school yard where she had once played, Hanna Rhodes was felled by two blasts to the chest.” Melodramatic, sure. But the entire scene seemed to call for Grand Guignol.

“Fourteen years ago,” I continued, “it was Hanna Rhodes’s eyewitness testimony that sent Charles Conklin to prison for life. The senior detective assigned to the case, the detective who first heard her account, was Jerry Kelsey.

“Behind us, you see the inferno that has consumed the modest trailer home of Detective Jerry Kelsey. The coroner informs us that firefighters have found an as-yet unidentified corpse among the ashes of Detective Kelsey’s trailer. It is still too hot for them to go in for a closer look, to attempt to identify the deceased.

“On Monday afternoon, a court hearing is scheduled on behalf of Charles Conklin to evaluate the testimony of Hanna Rhodes, to scrutinize the procedures used by Jerry Kelsey to elicit that testimony nearly a decade and a half ago. In light of the double tragedies, how much crucial testimony has been quieted? Quieted forever.”

I backed from the microphone that was being held in front of my face as a signal for the talent do his thing. He was good, stayed with the dramatic tone. As the camera pulled in close to him, I slipped away.

Mike was standing near Jack Riley watching me, grinning sardonically as I walked up to him.

“So?” I said to Jack.

He seemed pleased. “The station is already re-running your special report.”

“When did I get upgraded from sixty-second bit to special report? Does the pay go up, too?”

Mike said, “I thought I told you to stay out of trouble.”

“I thought I told you not to tell me what to do.” I leaned against him. “Did I leave out anything?”

“My name,” Mike said.

“Must have slipped my mind,” I said.

Mike was called away by the coroner. I stayed and had a long talk with Jack before I walked back to the car to make some calls. I wanted to find Jennifer.

I had no home number for Jennifer. No one answered at her office. Not knowing anywhere else to try, I called Baron Marovich’s office and left a message, and then called his campaign headquarters out in the Valley and left another message for Roddy O’Leary. I gave them both Mike’s mobile number. Then I called James Shabazz, to fill him in.

Jack had been right. As soon as the petroleum-fire crew appeared, the party was just about over. Street traffic had caused some delay for the foam tankers, but when they came, they moved right in with their big hoses. At the same time, an aerial tanker dove in overhead and dropped its red slime on the flaming oil barrels. The blaze disappeared, but the stench of burning petroleum and rubber lingered.

The helicopters, one by one, turned off their spots and swooped away, leaving us in an eerie darkness. The flashing lights of the official vehicles, the floods set up by the news people, the streetlights, could not penetrate the dense black smoke beyond a few yards. Nonessential personnel began to go, each one leaving the scene darker, quieter. I watched them all, waiting for Mike to come back.

We were among the last to leave. The coroner wouldn’t be able to get to the corpse until daylight. Official identification and cause of death could take weeks. There was nothing left for us to do.

I felt a tremendous adrenaline letdown, exhausted and excited all at once. We stopped by my office to pick up the mail on the way home. Back on the freeway, Mike was quiet, lost in thought or reluctant to restart the argument. The ringing of the car telephone startled us both.

Roddy O’Leary was angry. “What do you have against Baron? He’s a decent guy, he’s done a good job for the county. Why are you crucifying him?”

“We both know the answer to that, Roddy.”

“What’s it going to take to make you stop?”

I said, “The truth.”

“Whose truth? Dang, Maggie, you know as well as anyone does that truth is a slimy bastard-keeps changing its shape. You have a version, Baron has a version, that fucking con has a version. You’ve taken some pretty dirty shots at Baron. You’re killing him in the polls.”

And killing you, I thought. A campaign director’s price is set by his last campaign. Lose one, move back two spaces. For Roddy, a loss in the D.A.‘s race would probably eliminate any chance of getting a governor-race gig, even state assembly would be reaching.

I want a debate,” he said. “I want you on TV, give Baron a chance to answer.”

“Sorry,” I said, “debate isn’t my format.”

“You owe him.”

“I don’t owe him a goddamn thing. And I’m not going to debate him.”

Roddy was persistent. “Ralph Faust says he’ll give us air time. Thirty minutes tomorrow afternoon, replayed at eleven.”

“If I do it,” I said, “the format is discussion, not a debate. And I bring a friend or two with me.”

“Who?”

“I’ll let you know, if I decide to go ahead.”

Mike thought it was a bad idea to have a face-off. After he let me know that, he had nothing more to say. All the rest of the way home, and while we got ready for bed, he was like a mute. Very unusual for Mike.

I didn’t get to the office mail until I sat down on the bed. In the middle of the stack, there was a plain envelope with my name hand-printed on the front. There was no note inside. Nothing except copies of the affidavits dated the week before and signed by Hanna Rhodes and LaShonda DeBevis. I passed them to Mike.

All he said when he read them was, “Hmm.” Then he rolled over and went to sleep. Or pretended to.