Bad Intent

Chapter 34

Jennifer’s San Pedro house was a small restored bungalow, about halfway up a steep hill lined with similar restored bungalows. There was good art on the walls, expensive, deep rugs on the hardwood floors. The view of the Los Angeles harbor from her living room windows reminded me of the view from my San Francisco house, minus a couple of bridges.

I walked quickly through the front of the house, using only the light from the large bay windows to find my way around, and staying in the shadows.

I knew Jennifer hadn’t been home for a few days, but the house had the sharp pine scent of recent cleaning-hired help. There were only two bedroom doors, ergo, no live-in, so I moved without worrying about the noise made when I stepped across the bare wood spaces between rugs.

Jennifer’s son’s room was orderly, smelled slightly of rodent piss. I could see the place on his desk, next to a bag of feed, where he kept his hamster when he was at home.

When I looked into the child’s room, I felt for the first time like the thief in the night I was. While I would almost relish being caught and forced to explain why I had jimmied Jennifer’s dining room window and climbed through, I had very different feelings about the boy learning that his space had been invaded by a stranger. Without going in further than the doorframe, I shut his door and crossed to the second bedroom.

Jennifer’s room was larger than her son’s and had a better view of the harbor below. Everything was tidy, feminine in a business-like way.

Old houses never have enough closets. Jennifer had broken through a bathroom wall into some sort of back passageway, and converted that space into a walk-in closet. I went into the closet, shut the door, and turned on the light.

All of her clothes were arranged by function, length, and color, with work suits filling an entire side rack. She preferred two suit labels-both expensive-and wore a size four. Her shoes also were sorted by color and function: sports shoes, boots, flats, neat little pumps that coordinated with her neat little suits-all of the pumps from the same shoemaker.

I photographed the shoe rack, made a close-up of the color gap between black and gray, then took a shot of the rank of jacket sleeves. When I put my camera away in my bag, I tucked a pair of her pumps in beside it.

Jennifer had a desk in a comer of the dining room. There was no Rolodex, so I turned on her computer, found the tools file, and loaded her address book from the disk. She had none of the key players listed by name, which I found strange: Why wouldn’t an attorney have the district attorney’s office number in her files? I typed in the number for Marovich campaign headquarters and asked for a search. The tag came back: she had listed the number under pizza. I printed the file, made a back-up disk, and got the hell out.

A smooth caper; I was back in my car within five minutes from the time I had climbed through her window. As I turned off her street, a private patrol car turned in. The driver looked at me, but probably dismissed any thought of someone who did not fit the burglar profile in his training manual.

Down on Gaffey Street, outside a club, I stopped at a pay phone and called home again.

I need to go by my office,” I told Casey. “Tell Mike.”

Up the Harbor Freeway hitting eighty, slowed on the Hollywood to seventy, over the Cahuenga Pass and into the Valley in thirty minutes, easy.

I dropped my film at an all-night, one-hour developer a block from my office, and tipped the clerk twenty bucks to deliver the prints to me on her break.

There were a lot of cars in the office lot and people walking around outside my building. Lighting was good. But I parked in the fire zone next to the front door and asked the security guard to escort me down the long hall to my office, to come inside with me and look around. When I was satisfied that everything was as it should be, I thanked him, bolted the door behind him, and set to work.

Guido gave me some advice by phone before he hung up in frustration and drove over. Mike arrived at about the same time, with both of the kids. I put them all to work and rewarded their diligence with not-very-burned microwave popcorn and canned soda.

It was fun. Everyone had a task. Michael and Casey began repacking the tapes Casey had just finished filing, getting ready for the movers again. Mike and Guido bent together over a computer image manipulator. The only difficulty we encountered was agreeing on the music to play on the radio: Michael wanted headbanger, Casey preferred the Russian classics that sent Mischa into raptures, Mike held out for country, and Guido wanted, as always, jazz. We compromised on reggae.

My assigned area was Jennifer. Guido had brought along a fun new piece of equipment that made prints from videotape. I ran through miles of fire videos that Jack had given me, isolated a shot of Ralph Faust: Ralph looking like Prince Charming weeping over Cinderella’s tiny slipper-a size six, navy blue pump on his palm.

I made a series, zooming in closer with each print, Ralph holding the shoe with the fire as background, his hand with the shoe, the shoe alone, the scuffed heel only.

I was still playing with variations when the pictures I had taken in San Pedro were delivered. I sorted through them, picked four, put them on the stack accumulating on the table beside me. Onto the stack I added the pictures I had taken outside Kelsey’s trailer, Jennifer stopping to dump gravel out of her shoe. I played with the sequence, then I laid them all in a line on the floor. At the end of the line, I arranged the stolen shoes to match the angle of the first shot.

“Mike?” I said. “Where is that shoe I gave you at the fire?”

“Evidence locker somewhere. Why?”

“Can I have it?”

“Not a chance.” He came to peer over my shoulder. “Jesus. Good match. Where’d you go shopping?”

“Jennifer’s closet.”

Mike’s face turned a dangerous red. “Just don’t tell me about it.”

“Not much to tell.”

I asked Guido to make a tape of the prints. When he finished, I changed the angle of the shoes a few times, having him tape each alteration.

You walk a mile in your shoes and they begin molding to your feet, show where the toes and bunions are, bend over your instep in a particular way. The shoe on Ralph’s hand, the shoe on Jennifer’s foot, the shoes on my crappy office carpet all had the same characteristic big toe bump. Like a fingerprint.

I was editing the tape, fiddling with the sequence and form, when Mike summoned me. He had commandeered a tape player.

“See this?” Like a proud new father, he started the tape. He had taken the shot of Jennifer’s coat sleeves hanging in her closet, superimposed it over her shoe rack, manipulated the scale using the computer, so that the black sleeves lined up with the black shoes, the gray sleeves with the gray shoes, the navy blue sleeves with empty space. Over the space, he had laid the image of the battered navy blue pump in Ralph’s hand.

“I’m impressed,” I said.

He shrugged. “I do this shit all the time. It’s the way you put together any case. Except, I hang tight until I get a warrant so I can actually use what I find. Question is, what are you going to do with this foot thing when you’re finished?”

“I’m going to blackmail Jennifer.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. But from his tone I knew he wasn’t at all sure I was kidding.

“I didn’t have a warrant for this, either.” I tossed him the tape I had made of my Biltmore conversation with Marovich. “Marovich spilling his guts. Can’t use it in court, but it’s interesting. He mentions you, big guy.”

“Jeez,” Mike muttered, but he slipped the little tape into his shirt pocket.

“I have a legal question for you,” I said.

“A little late for that, isn’t it?”

“Say you’re a lawyer, defending a client.”

“Never happen,” he said, a reflex.

I punched his arm, almost gently. “Say you’re a lawyer defending a client for crimes in which you participated.”

The know-it-all sneered. “Jennifer was in grade school when Wyatt Johnson got shot.”

“Wrong crime. Baron Marovich has retained Jennifer to defend him. He’s facing a campaign fraud charge, according to the docs on Jennifer’s desk. He has an appointment tomorrow with the U.S. attorney to discuss Roddy’s crimes, and Jennifer is going with him.”

“No shit?” Taken by surprise. I love it when I can drop one on him. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Well, Baron will get one tight defense,” Mike said. “If he goes down, he’ll sure as hell take her with him.”

“Poor Jennifer,” I said. I handed him the print-out I had made at her house. “But we can bring her down without Baron. She’s the lynchpin in all of this, the connection between Conklin and the D.A. and the preacher and the campaign. It’s all one. I don’t know whether Jennifer actually lit any fires, but she was there with the marshmallows when it happened.”

Mike turned off the player. “What are you going to do with this shoe bomb?”

“Copy to Jennifer, copy to Hector, one for the Bar Association, put it in the Big Film. Guido and I have a beautiful one-hour package almost ready for Lana, lays out the chain of conspiracy from the shooting of Wyatt up to this afternoon. We still need to work on the hearing this afternoon and the resignation of Baron, but we’re close. The network’s legal people are going to have fits, but I think we’re okay until we get to Jennifer at the fire’s point of origin.”

The cop came back to me, deep furrows between his white brows. “What are you going to say about Jennifer and the fire?”

I glanced at Guido before I answered, because we had argued this one out. “We’ll run the lab reports on the shoe found at the scene, highlight where they say traces of gasoline and paraffin were present. If we were doing a dramatization, I would have an actress run across the gravel lot, take off her shoes because they got full of rocks, slowed her down. And she was in a hurry. When that fire started, to quote the expert, ‘Kaboom.’ She’s lucky all she lost was a shoe.”

“That’s all wild supposition,” he said.

“I don’t think so. When she ran away from Kelsey’s, she just kept right on running. Like a jackrabbit, found some cover. She had the weekend to think things through, to talk with the other players. By Sunday night, she was still shaken, but resolved to gut it out to the end. To shut me up.”

The telephone rang. Guido answered, said, “She is,” and handed the receiver to me. But I heard only a dead line.

“Who was it?” I asked.

“Man.” He shrugged a shoulder. “Asked for you.”

“How did he sound?”

“Nervous, maybe. How much can you get from, ‘Is Maggie there?’”

We all went back to work. The call, or Mike’s reaction to it, unsettled me. Mike didn’t say anything, but he pulled out his shirttail and tucked it back in behind the automatic holstered at his side. After a while, maybe half an hour, Casey, stretching her back, asked, “Can I take Michael up and show him around the studio?”

Mike scowled, so I said, “Later. We’ll all go up and see what’s happening.”

“I’m bored,” she said, and yawned. She stretched out on the old sofa and turned on a TV sitcom.

It was about five minutes later that there was a knock on the door. Everyone froze, except Mike. He unholstered his gun. “Who is it?” he asked through the closed door.

“Ben, security. Courier delivered a letter for Maggie.”

Mike opened the door enough to make sure that it was Ben, then enough to accept the envelope. He said thanks, then shut and bolted the door again. He held the envelope to the light, smelled it, bent it a couple of times before he handed it over to me.

The return address on the envelope was the district attorney’s office. My name was handwritten on the front, and the notation that it was personal. I took out a sheet similar to the one on which he had written his resignation.

Over my shoulder, Mike read the single line on the page. He asked, “Do you get it?”

“I think so. You better call someone to go check on Marovich. Some of the things he said earlier-this feels bad.”

Casey said, “Mom?” in a quavering voice.

She was sitting bolt upright, her eyes wide as she pointed to the television screen. There was a news break interrupting her program.

“The condition of the district attorney has not been confirmed. Paramedics are still in his offices. Earlier reports that gunfire was involved in his injury also cannot be confirmed. Members of Mr. Marovich’s staff have reported that the district attorney, who resigned from the re-election campaign only hours ago, was alone in his office when they heard what sounded like a single gunshot.”

Mike took the note from me, the single, handwritten line over Marovich’s signature: “Mea culpa. Mea culpa. Mea maxima culpa.”