Chapter 23
At seven, I still hadn’t heard from Mike. I reached Michael just as he was leaving the house to pick up his date.
“I saw your story on the news,” he said. “Pretty spooky.”
“Very spooky. Stay watchful. If you get home before your dad or me, call me here at the office. The way things are, I don’t want you to be home alone at night.”
“Don’t worry. I’m spending the weekend at my mom’s. Didn’t Casey tell you?”
“Not in so many words.” Vaguely, I remembered her saying something about me and Mike being alone for the weekend.
“Be careful anyway. Any ideas where I might find Mike?”
“No. Sorry. Probably just has his pager turned off.”
“Probably,” I said, followed by good-bye.
LaShonda and Guido announced that they were hungry. I was hungry, too, but I didn’t want to leave in case Mike called. The two of them went to dinner without me, promising to bring me back something.
When the door was locked behind them, I took out a large schedule book and began plotting out our post-production requirements, making a work schedule, what Linda Westman would call a time budget.
Almost immediately, the phone began to ring. Lana Howard called to say the response to the broadcast amounted to a groundswell. Jack Riley said he was impressed anew by my wickedness. Baron Marovich’s campaign chair, Roddy O’Leary, announced that he planned to sue me. An anonymous caller promised to blow my fucking head off. Ralph Faust invited me to dinner with his people to talk about a job.
I used the phone myself twice, to page Mike again and to make sure Casey had arrived at her father’s house in Denver. After that, I left it on the machine and monitored calls, paying only enough attention to listen for Mike.
Around nine, about the time I was thinking Guido and LaShonda were taking a lot of time to eat, I got up. Feeling restless, I turned on a tape player, scanned through LaShonda’s interview until I got to the part that kept jabbing me.
“He scared me,” she said, referring to Mike. “I was just a little kid. My mother always told me to watch out for strangers, and he was a stranger to me. I had never spoken to a white man before he came by. He was big, he talked different from the people I knew, sounded just like my teacher, and she scared the you-know-what out of me every day. I can’t say whether the officer did anything, or said anything that I would see as a threat if I heard it now, but back then, everything he said seemed like a threat. But I was still more scared of Pinkie.
“I remember talk about a bicycle.” She dropped her head so her voice faded. “My mother got mad whenever I asked her about it. All I know is, I’ve never had a bike in my whole life. Never learned to ride one.
“And I remember the day I finally told the officer what he wanted to hear. He came by school and told me Pinkie was gone, and if I wanted to keep him away forever I had to talk.”
I asked: “Did you tell him what he wanted to hear, or did you tell him the truth?”
“A little of both.”
I was concentrating so hard that I startled when I heard a knock on the door.
“Who is it?” I shouted.
“Jennifer Miller,” came the answer, but quiet, pressed close to the doorjamb.
I thought it was a prank, but I turned off the tape and went to the door. “Are you alone?”
“Please. I don’t want to be seen here.”
I opened the door enough to make sure she was indeed Ms. Miller and that she was alone, then I opened it enough to let her slip in.
Jennifer had been crying. Her face was all ugly blotches, her hair was a mess, and her perky blouse slopped out over her waistband. I led her over to the sofa. When she set her purse on the floor at her feet, I hefted it to make sure she wasn’t packing something lethal.
I asked, “Can I get you something?”
“Yes. Cyanide.”
“Ice or straight up? Maybe mixed with scotch?”
She almost smiled. She raised her swollen eyes to meet mine. “My career is finished. Thanks to you.”
“Thank yourself. What brings you here?”
“Stupidity. When I saw your hatchet job on me, I was so furious I wanted to confront you, make you retract everything you said about me.”
“Something changed your mind?”
She began to laugh. “Traffic was bad. I took out my angst on the other drivers. Now I can’t think of anywhere else to go but here.”
“Home?” I offered. I went to the rented refrigerator and found her a root beer. “What about your own office?”
“Can’t.” She took the can from me. “Everyone is gunning for me. This is the last place anyone would look for me. I need some time to think.”
I was standing in the middle of the room. “Do you want to talk about it?”
When she shook her head, I went back to my calendar and tried to pick up the thread. The telephone rang, the machine clicked on. As soon as I knew it wasn’t Mike, I turned down the volume a few notches, and went back to my work. I had no more than found where I left off when Jennifer said, “I knew better.”
I didn’t look up. “Did you?”
“This case was supposed to be a major step up for me. Major. I knew from the beginning Conklin was assigned to me only because none of the partners or senior staff in the firm wanted to touch it. But I took it. I thought-it sounds so naive-I thought I could make my chops on it.”
“The gangbangers call that getting jumped in,” I said. “They beat the crap out of you and if you survive, they let you join their set.”
She laughed softly, bitterly. “I didn’t survive.”
“That’s the point,” I said. “If everyone survived, what kind of initiation would it be?”
“I’ll be disbarred.”
I didn’t say anything to that, but what went through my mind again was my father’s favorite old saw, “You make your bed, you lie in it.” What I said was, “If it’s such a big case, why wouldn’t anyone else touch it?”
“Because of Baron. He had too much involvement, too much interference.”
“Too much ego,” I said.
“Definitely,” she said. “I saw the pitfalls, but there was merit.”
“And there was media.”
“Yes, there was media.” She had the grace to blush. To busy her hands she picked up a bag of Doritos Guido had left on the sofa, took out a few chips, fiddled with them.
Eyes fixed in space, she said, “We didn’t expect a vigorous challenge. We weren’t ready for it. We weren’t ready for you.”
“You didn’t do your homework, Jennifer,” I said. “Or you would have been smarter about the target you picked. You can take cheap shots at the police department all day and the public will roll for you. Bad cops make good press because everyone likes to hate the police right now. I would have stayed out of it and clucked my tongue like every other politically correct asshole in town. But you made your big mistake when you named the cops, and got it wrong.”
“We didn’t get it wrong.”
I said, “Oh?”
“I may have fucked up trying to hold it all together, but I stand by the allegations against Flint and Kelsey. They coerced their witnesses to lie.”
I stayed calm. It took effort, but I stayed mellow. I knew she was a lawyer and had a lawyer’s skew on facts and implications. Then I took some of my own old advice and did some silent counting. When I passed ten the second time, I got up and stretched. The telephone had rung twice more. No Mike.
“So, Jennifer,” I said, “can I get you something else to drink? Something a little stronger than root beer? Guido already has a stash around somewhere.”
“If you are.”
There was half a bottle of chardonnay in the refrigerator. I found two more-or-less clean glasses and poured. I let her get some of it down before I said, “Charles Conklin is quite a guy.” She responded with a shudder.
“Spent much time with him?”