“I meant, the pictures humiliated her.”
“But I meant, does she know about us?”
“No.”
“How sure are you of that?”
“I’ve told you a million times, Donna — she doesn’t know. And at this point, what would it matter?”
“Things like this always matter.”
“She never knew. She doesn’t now.”
Donna looked at me in the near dark.
“Well, Jordan Ishmael does.”
I waited, a cold wave of nerves breaking over my scalp.
“We talked. He talked, mainly.”
“Explain.”
“Said he wanted to confirm his suspicions about us. Said he was acting on a tip. And, thus confirmed, he wanted to know... if... I needed help.”
“It was a bluff and a come-on. He doesn’t know anything about us.”
“Well, when he said that, he was standing about where you are now. He knocked. He identified himself. I’ll give him that. It was my fault, Terry. I’d come over from Tonello’s. He just followed. Or maybe he did get a tip — I don’t know. I denied you even knew about this place, but it didn’t help much. Not with two mugs on the counter, and that bottle of tequila, and your Sheriffs windbreaker over the chair.”
My skin rose up and crawled. “When?”
“Three days ago. You were still in jail.”
“Arrested by Ishmael.”
She said nothing.
“Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”
“It didn’t make sense to. I thought you might... do something you’d regret.”
“So, what did you tell him?”
“That you were a good man and that someone was framing you. And if he wanted to help me, he could do it by helping you. And if he saw fit to speak of our arrangement I’d burn his ass on the news, sooner or later.”
I couldn’t speak just then. All I could do is feel the blood pounding against my eardrums, a rush that felt like a river.
“He offered to show me the pictures of you and the girl. Girls. If I had any doubt.”
“Did you take him up on it?”
“Of course I did. I’m a reporter. They’re you, Terry. I know you didn’t do what they show you doing, but they’re you. They’re good.”
“But what did he want?”
Donna sighed, then turned to face me. I could see the small light reflected by her eyes. “Terry, I honestly believe all he really wanted was to help me. His concern seemed genuine. And he wanted to rattle your cage, too. One accomplishes the other, doesn’t it?”
“Help you? Did he touch you?”
“No, he did not. And if I were you, I’d derail that train of thought before it made a real fool out of myself.”
I will admit I felt nothing that moment except the desire to pound Ishmael senseless with my bare hands or, even better, an ax handle, hammer, gun butt, Mag-Lite, irrigation pipe, tire iron, Louisville Slugger...
“I know what you’re thinking, Terry. And that’s exactly why I didn’t tell you the day it happened. But God knows, I couldn’t wait forever.”
There was a long silence while we faced each other in the dark. I could see the distant freeways past Donna’s shoulder and the little gleam coming from her eyes.
“Look, it’s late,” she said. “Take your woman to the shower now, will ya? Suds her up and smooth her over. She’s beat up by the world as we know it, and she could use your arms. Can’t let some jealous lieutenant ruin your whole day. What do you say, crime-buster?”
“All right, Donna. Okay.”
She stayed in the shower for almost an hour. When she came out she was in her robe. Her hair was damp and combed straight back and she was clean and fragrant. But I’d never seen her look so tired. So small. Still, I had to know her answer, and that meant I had to ask.
“Would you be willing to testify in court for me?”
She looked startled, then suspicious, then, quite simply, exhausted. “Testify to what?”
“Being with me at the hotel, January eleventh.”
She walked up to me and looked hard into my eyes. She leaned against me.
“Yes,” she said.
“I don’t think it will come to that.”
“But let me tell you just one thing, dear man — someday you’re going to have to give back as much as you take.”
She walked into the bedroom.
I nodded, not really understanding, but wanting to. I sat up for a while thinking about what she had said. Oh, I owed: I understood that much. I understood that I owed Donna the truth, and hadn’t fully offered it yet. Secrets are debts. And the more of them you hold inside, or the bigger they are, the more you owe. I was a heavy debtor. But there was nothing I was proud of in what I could offer of truth. And I believed then, as I had believed all along, that when I paid the debt I owed her, she would leave me. I had long ago accepted the fact that I am not an honorable man. But I wanted her. And lack of honor can’t destroy desire. Just ask The Horridus. Or me.
I lay in bed beside her, but I didn’t sleep.
Twenty-Six
The “serpent field” off of Laguna Hills Road and Moulton Parkway was actually a park. Not a groomed and organized place, no rest rooms or picnic benches, no fire rings or forest fire warnings — just a hundred acres of Southern California scrub on low foothills tapering down to Moulton Creek. The creek was slow and shallow and I could see flags of algae waving in the current just under the surface. It wound around the west side of the park, then passed under a wooden bridge. There was an old asphalt road running through the property, long closed to traffic and used on this fine morning by joggers and bicyclists and mothers pushing strollers. The brushy hills rose up from the edge of the road. I could see some rock out-croppings near the tops of the hillocks.
Hug the water.
I walked a narrow trail along the stream, which was mostly hidden from sight by a thick canopy of bamboo and sumac and wild dill. You smelled water, dead branches, sprouting leaves, sunshine. You heard grasshoppers, the stream moving, cars in the distance and the occasional wheel squeak of a dove doing thirty-five mph overhead. Every few hundred yards was a small clear area of what looked like beach sand, and from those you could see the lazy little creek heading back into the darkness of the bamboo. When you’d push through the foliage and walk out onto a spit of that sand and glance at all the rich green and running water before you, it seemed like an unspoiled little corner of nature. Then you noticed the cigarette butts and beer cans, the candy wrappers and footprints, the dog turds and flies and the pathetic little nests of shredded clothes and newspapers used by human beings desperate for a night’s sleep, and you knew better.
I stood there on one of those sandbars with my paper shopping bag containing five thousand cash, my fake mustaches — what a value that had turned out to be — my sunglasses and my baseball cap down low. I felt like the bottom feeder I was. The cap was a gag gift from Ardith one year, and it has a ponytail coming out the strap hole in the back. It’s not real hair, but it looks real enough. I went back out to the trail and loitered along, waiting for contact.
Ten minutes later I got it, just a quick hey man from the dense bamboo along the water. I stopped. I looked toward the voice but saw nothing but the rampant trunks of bamboo and the deep green daggers of leaves that hid the stream below. A spider web stretched across three feet of space in front of me caught the sunlight. In the middle its architect hunkered dark and still in the silver wires. He believed himself hidden.
Hey Mal? That you?
“Yup.”
Got it?
“Got it.”