Reached in his downtown office late last night, according to the reporter, Marovich denied every allegation of creating a reverse Willie Horton in order to get attention for his campaign.
He labeled me an example of media gone amok, a dangerous propagandist and dirty-trickster, tried to tuck me into his opponent’s camp. I had to read ahead to get his opponent’s name, because it had slipped my memory.
The story continued on page twenty-three, half a column giving a, synopsis of Marovich’s campaign history and some of the unfair-campaign-practices charges filed against him over the years.
Overall, the coverage was okay-I knew it would send Marovich into the stratosphere-but the best part was a little sidebar, a short, related bit of information set off within an attractive gray border. The headline was: “When Career Criminals Go Free.” The story gave details of a few of the more horrific crimes committed by convicts after they were released from prison on legal technicalities. Charles Conklin was not mentioned anywhere in the sidebar.
I called Guido, woke him up, gloated with him about the story. He was happy, though I thought he wasn’t as chatty as usual. He didn’t prolong the conversation beyond the essentials. I also thought I heard someone else in his bedroom.
There were some muffins in the freezer. I put one in the microwave, made a second cup of coffee with milk, and was halfway through it when Mike made his stumbling entrance.
By the time we got home the night before, Mike had been at the point of crashing. It had been difficult enough to get him from the car and into the bed. Beyond taking off his belt and shoes, I hadn’t bothered wrestling off his clothes. Still wearing his dirty work clothes, unshaven for the second day, face puffy, eyes red-rimmed, he was a charming sight.
He shuffled the last few steps to the kitchen table, aimed a shaky hand, and grasped my coffee cup. After he finished it in one long swallow, he shuddered. Then he looked at me.
“Wha’ happen?” he said.
“Olga,” I said.
“Oh, yeah.” He sat down and raised the empty cup to me for a refill. “Have mercy. I haven’t had that much to drink in years. Never again,” he moaned. “I’m too old.”
“It happens to us all, big guy.”
“How come you’re not mad?” He frowned at me. “Don’t you love me?”
“It’s not your fault women keep falling into your lap. I understand the attraction.”
“Uh huh.” He looked at me askance, suspicious.
“Hector explained all that to me last night. A woman offers herself, what’s a poor sucker to do?”
“Oh my God.” He had color in his grizzled cheeks again. “He told you about Charlene?”
“Not in detail. She threw herself at him. He’s a gentleman, he had to catch her. Is that how it went?”
“More or less. She was pissed at me for taking Michael’s scout troop camping when she had some kind of gallery opening. Old Hector didn’t know what hit him.”
“You didn’t hit him?”
“Nah.” The tough guy was making a comeback. “Like you said, it wasn’t his fault.”
I slid the paper in front of him. “Our story made the front page.”
He looked at it dumbly, eyes not working in concert. “I need my glasses. Read it to me.”
“It’ll keep,” I said. “Are you hungry?”
“I’m getting there.”
I poured him about half a quart of juice and started frying eggs. Normally, Mike takes great care of himself, runs, watches what he eats. But that morning he was completely out of the loop. He ate four eggs, hashbrowns, a stack of toast, and a whole grapefruit. I don’t know where he put it, but it seemed to start the juices flowing again. When he finally crossed his fork and his knife on the edge of his plate, he looked like a potential survivor.
“So,” he said, leaning back in his chair, rubbing his chest, smiling up at me. “What’s the plan today?”
“The plan is no plan. I’ve hardly seen you all week. Can we just hang together for a while? You know, like a date?”
“Sounds good.”
“I’m going to take a shower.” I dumped my coffee dregs into the sink. “Would you do one favor for me? Would you listen to the phone messages and see what you think about them?”
“What I think about them?”
“Couple of them sound like serious death threats.”
Chapter 25
“It was after the Watts Festival one year, maybe the first year they held it, I don’t remember. Twenty years ago I guess.” Mike picked up a big plumber’s wrench from the shelf and set it in our shopping cart. We were cruising a hardware warehouse for a few essentials, some elbow joints, socket plates, a lot of spackle; our date. “Anyway, all of us who worked the festival-police and sheriffs-we went down to this vacant lot afterward, street dead-ended at the Artesia Freeway. They were still building the freeway so there was no one around, just a lot of dirt. Used to be a nice neighborhood, till the freeway took it out.
“So, we got some cases of beer and went down there, built a fire, starting unwinding. Pretty soon the girls started coming. I don’t know who put the word out, but you never saw so many girls.”
“Women,” I said.
“Girls,” he said, sorting through a bin of spackle blades. “It’s my story, so they’re girls.”
“Pig,” I said.
“Exactly. Back then, we were pigs, they were girls. You gotta know the language of the times or you’re not going to get this story at all.”
“I’ll try to keep up.” I was pushing the cart. The story was hard to listen to, more truth about Mike than I really needed at the moment. That’s exactly why he was telling it, a sort of test to see where I drew my line, how much truth I would take in before I stopped loving him. I had tried to change the subject a couple of times, but he always came back to the ugly day in the cul-de-sac.
“People were doing the dirty deed all over the place. Everywhere you looked, naked bodies.”
“What were you doing?” I asked.
“Just hanging. My partner got lucky on the hood of our car. I was sitting inside watching his little white ass pumping against the windshield in front of my face. Just pump, pump, pump. Funniest thing you ever saw.”
“And you just sat there?”
“Yeah.” He handed me a brown paper drop cloth. “So, I’m sitting there and this girl comes up to me and she says, ‘I’ll do you right here. Anything you want, but I won’t take it in the ass.’ “
“And did she?” I felt squeamish hearing all this, squeamish the way I felt when batons and fists entered his stories. We had moved a long way from the Olgas always trying to sit on his lap to where this conversation began.
“No,” Mike said, looking at the shelves. “She told me she’d already done ten guys by mouth. That really did it for me. I didn’t want her breathing the same air as me.”
“She did this for pay?”
“Nope. Just for the fun of it.”
“Was she pretty?”
“Not bad.”
While Mike was busy with wood putty, I walked away from him, pushed the cart over a few aisles to the cupboard knobs display because I didn’t want to get into something with him. All day there had been an edge.
Mike and I argue back and forth all the time-cop, Berkeley liberal; natural foes. It’s usually a lot of fun. We both posture and exaggerate our opinions just to jerk the other’s chain. This story disturbed me. Especially the just-for-fun part.
Mike came up behind me. “Find something?”
“No.” I bent down to look at the knobs in the bottom row because I didn’t want to look at Mike. I heard him take a big breath.
“It was a long time ago, Maggie. Things were different then.”
“Did I say anything?”
“You didn’t have to.”
I straightened up and turned to face him. “I love your stories. You know I do. This one’s hard to take.”