Thirty-Three
The department mandates a thirty-day home leave for deputies involved in fatal shootings. I spent the first day sitting around the apartment, filling out paperwork brought over by Louis and Frances. Really I spent it thinking about Johnny Escobedo and the family he’d left behind. I called Gloria and all she could do was cry. I cried with her. She asked me if I’d talk about him at the funeral and I felt my heart burst and flutter like a balloon. My chest ached for hours so I went to the emergency room and got checked out. Nothing wrong with my heart, they assured me, just pain from the cut in my side. I knew better.
All day I kept running through those last few minutes in my mind, wondering if I’d made the wrong call, wondering if there was some way we could have shaken The Horridus out of there without costing Johnny his life. The answer is, as it often is in our line of work: yes. Yes, I could have waited for more officers. Yes, I could have held back for daylight. Yes, if I’d known he was lying like a viper in a cramped tunnel we could have called a fire engine to flush him out. Yes, I could have chosen to investigate the runoff lines on the other side of the channel myself. But I didn’t. I did what we thought was best and right, and it had gotten Johnny dead. I paced the little apartment, sometimes picturing him in my mind. Sometimes it was Johnny alive; sometimes it was Johnny with his head in the water. More memories to love and hate, more to protect and abhor. I dread all things that are gone. I always thought my biggest opponent was the future, but it has turned out to be the past.
I talked on the phone, napped fitfully but with vivid, inexplicable dreams. I ate some canned peaches and half a pack of cookies. Every once in a while I ran my fingers over the bandage covering the tight twenty-five stitches in my side, courtesy of the snake tank I’d run through. The cut was long but not deep because of my ribs, which had done their job and sheltered what was inside. They ached profoundly, but nothing like the heart behind them.
Late afternoon on that first day, I called Alton Allen “Chet” Sharpe and told him I was coming by to talk to the girl I’d paid $10,000 to meet. The girl in the pictures. I was ready to go live.
He and his wife, Caryn, were at their main residence — a place I’d never been to. It was evening on a quiet street in Anaheim, one of the thousands of Orange County avenues where just about anyone can live and be left alone to do whatever it is they do, so long as they do it quietly. Such is the blessing and the curse of suburbia. All the notoriety surrounding the selling of their daughter for sex and the suicide of their customer during a police sting had been focused on the Sharpe rental in Orange, miles away. If Chet and Caryn’s Anaheim neighbors even knew who they really were, there was no sign of it. In fact, the door was open when I got there and a cute little girl of about six was standing there, holding a stuffed bear, waving at me.
She watched me come up the walkway and onto the porch.
“Hello, Sergeant Naughton,” she said with a smile.
“Chet home?”
“He’s expecting you.”
She giggled, pleased at remembering her lines. Chet appeared behind her, with his Chet-likes-Chet grin. He set a hand on the girl’s shoulder and shooed her out past me. I noted the little swept-up ends of his freshly manicured fingernails. I noted his pressed shirt and smart necktie, and the pen in his pocket.
“Neighbor girl,” he said. “They always seem to take to Caryn and me.”
I looked to make sure the girl was out of earshot, then turned back to Chet. “You take to her, and I’ll kill you.”
“I know you would. You’re good at killing. Come on in.”
I turned again to watch the girl disappear into the front door of what I truly hoped was her own home.
Chet led me inside. The place was decorated in the past tense — green shag carpet popular twenty years ago, heavy furniture, some busy wallpaper in silvers and greens. Lots of children’s toys lying around for girls like the one who met me at the door. Mirrors everywhere. It smelled like fried food. We stood in the den. There were cartoons playing on the TV. From the open doorway I heard the sounds of someone knocking pans in the kitchen and a rising hiss from the stovetop.
“Made your bail, I see.”
“Always save for a rainy day. I talk to Linda every morning, at Orangewood. Getting a good education, some therapy she likes.”
“You’re pure slime, Chet.”
“We’ll be reunited. She’ll be back someday. You can’t tear apart the American family that easy. Have a seat?”
I looked around the miserable room. I looked at groomed Chet. I looked through the doorway to see Caryn with her back to me, getting something out of the refrigerator. She had on a denim dress too short for her and her big hair was done up big as usual, lacquered into swirls that looked stormswept.
“I thought at first it was your daughter,” I said.
“Thought who was?”
“The girl in the pictures.”
“Well, I never saw those, so I wouldn’t know, would I?”
“But you knew what I. R. Shroud was using them for.”
“I found out later. He just wanted some old stuff that maybe hadn’t been shown around for a while. Something that might look new. If I’d known he was having some fun with you, I’d have had them to him a lot quicker.”
“You make some money off them?”
“Nope. We enthusiasts trade back and forth. It’s fun — not profit, Deputy.”
“It’s a crime.”
“Making art with pictures that old isn’t a crime. The statute of limitations ran out a long time ago. You know that, or you wouldn’t be here without your storm troopers beside you and your six-gun blazing.”
He smiled at me, rather prissily, as if he were genuinely offended by me.
I considered Chet for a moment. Though it rankled my soul to its core, Chet was basically untouchable now. Yes, he had a trial pending on a multitude of charges, ranging from child endangerment to pandering a minor. Yes, the evidence was compelling and Chet was about to take his first hard fall. But it was his first, and that would be a big factor. Caryn’s first, and Linda’s, too. I’d already heard from Loren that Chet and Caryn were going to argue that Linda’s services as a model were being offered to me, not services as a prostitute. Loren said that a legitimate modeling portfolio belonging to Linda was going to help their case measurably. In court, I foresaw the my-word-against-theirs case shaping up, and my job would be to convince a jury that I knew the difference between buying photo time with a girl and buying her body. Chet would try to convince them of roughly the same thing. Of course, Caryn could not be made to testify against him. Linda, as a minor, could. But I knew where her loyalties were and I knew she’d be hostile all the way to the verdicts. It was going to be a long and ugly thing.