A Bitch Called Hope (2 page)

Her best friend, Ham, swept up a game of solitaire when he spotted her and stood, his arms stretched for a hug.

“Watch the cracked rib,” she said. “Where is everybody?”

“You’re the first,” he said. “Did the check from Fidelity come?”

Old Ham kept better track of her accounts receivable than she did. She shook her head.

His arms folded around her and he patted her gently on the back. She pressed her face against his UC Berkeley warm-up jacket. The top of her head reached under his chin. He wore his brown hair short, his beard clipped close to his chin. His beard was going gray, which bugged Lennox more than it did him. It was weird to see a friend going gray when she’d known him since they were teenagers back in the Berkeley days when he used to date her roommate. Sophomore year he taught Lennox five-card stud. It’s hard not to love what you’re good at, and she was an ace at telling whether a guy was bluffing or holding by the way he jiggled his leg or tugged at his lower lip. From then on, Fridays were poker night.

Long story short, both Ham and Lennox moved to Portland ten years ago. Ham, a forensic accountant, had married a tax attorney who didn’t mind taking herself off to the movies every Friday night. This December found Lennox playing cards for a lot higher stakes than their school days. Which was fine so long as her checking account wasn’t on an intravenous drip.

Ham drew out his wallet, pulled out a fold of bills and tried to press them into her hand.

She pushed his hand back.

Fish walked in. “Am I interrupting something?” It was hard for Fish to look innocent when his hairline reached to the bridge of his nose.

“I don’t know.” She turned to Ham. “Is Sasquatch interrupting something?”

“Play nice,” Ham said.

“I am,” she said.

The rest of the gang, Jerry, Fulin, and Sarge, trailed behind the waitress into the back room, Fulin doing the talking. “So he says do I want to be his wife.”

“Fulin, man, your hair’s down to your ass; what do you expect?” Jerry said. “I’ll start with a pint of Black Butte, Katy.”

Fulin hung his leather jacket on a wall hook by the door. He looked more like a rock star than a parole officer. Underneath his jacket, he wore a tight red tee shirt with a butterfly beaded across the chest.

Jerry shook his head. “He wears his girlfriend’s clothes and wonders why honest men mistake him for a fairy.”

“I like it,” Lennox said.

Jerry smacked his lips. “You’d fill it out. Listen gorgeous, you want representation at traffic court?”

“I heard she was drunk,” Fish said.

“Get bent,” they all said.

Fish had been trying to transfer to vice for years. His theory as to why he was passed over time after time was that the brass disliked Catholics. And it was true he got a raft of abuse from the other cops for attaching a magnetic Jesus fish to his squad car. But the real reason he never got promoted to vice? No one wanted to work with the prick.

Ham shuffled the cards, the laminate snapped and Lennox’s heart beat a little faster. Her Bronco in the body shop, her mortgage, Christmas coming and Fidelity Insurance forty-three days in arrears, everything she stressed over faded when she heard the sound of cards riffling.

Each of them threw in a five-buck white chip. Ham dealt two cards down and the next card up. Lennox stalled until everyone else had seen their cards before she peeked. Some people rubbed a lucky coin or wore the same gnarly shirt every game— with her it was the peek.

Sweet. She drew a pair of fours. King up, she led the betting and threw in another white chip. Everyone stayed in.

Ham honked mightily into a large handkerchief and dealt another card.

Fulin raised.

“You got three of a kind, Butterfly Boy?” Jerry said.

Fulin kept his mouth shut but leaned forward slightly to release his trapped hair. Classic Fulin tell; he was bluffing.

Lennox’s cell phone vibrated against the pocket of her sweater. She ignored it and met Fulin’s raise. Everyone stayed in. Ham dealt the fourth card. She paired her king. The lights over the table reflected off Sarge’s bald head as he hunched over his hand. Translation: he had zip to zero. Then look at Fish being cool. What an asshole, sipping on his beer, stacking his chips in neat little piles. She so wanted to take him down. He was holding, she knew he was, but what? He had a pair of deuces on the table.

Her cell went off again. She drew it out of her pocket and looked at the screen. Her mother. She pocketed it.

“A client?” Ham blew his nose, then dealt the last card up.

“A boyfriend,” Jerry said.

“Aurora,” Lennox said. She peeked. Triple sweet. Her third four. “Raise ten.”

Fish lined up his tower of chips, his third deuce on the table. He had as much chance of looking casual as a werewolf trying to pass as a choirboy. He doubled her raise. If she could beat him, it would be worth the cracked ribs.

Everyone folded except Fish and Jerry and her. The way she figured it, even if Fish had a pair in the hole, she’d still beat him with her kings over fours. She tossed in her twenty and called.

“Four of a kind.” Fish fanned his cards.

The odds for drawing a four of a kind were five hundred ninety-four to one. Anyone else and she’d be happily cussing them out, but Fish? Goddamn, it hurt.

Replenishing her poker fund: add that to the list of bills.

Fish stretched his arms wide across the table and raked in his chips. All those little clay discs snicked against each other. The sound of luck.

Jerry ran his fingers through his hair and drained his beer.

Her cell phone buzzed. Aurora would press the redial every three minutes until Lennox called her back. Not like her mother didn’t know that Fridays were sacrosanct. Lennox pressed the off button on her phone and dropped it into her handbag.

Mothers need defined limits. Routines need to be established and maintained.

“You’re not going to call her back?” Sarge said. His watery blue eyes looked surprised.

“She’s at a Christmas party. She probably wants to tell me about a single man who’d be perfect for me.”

“Isn’t she like seventy?” Fulin said. “What if she had a heart attack?”

“My mother broke her hip last year when I was in Maui,” Jerry said. “She laid there for hours.”

“It’s probably nothing,” Ham said. And there it was. Her choice: she could either call her mother or see the reproach in their eyes, dutiful sons, every last one of them. Ham sneezed.

“Fine,” she said and stood up. “But if it’s a report from the party, Jerry goes out with the guy Aurora lined out for me.”

She might as well call her mother; she had nothing left to gamble with. She opened the door to beer-soaked laughter, the smell of fried fish heavy in the air. Force of habit, she checked out the cops by the front door. One of them swiveled on his bar stool and looked to where she was standing.

Tommy Pavlik.

He slid off his stool. Her feet seemed to have sunk roots into the planked floor. She’d dreaded this moment. Who was she kidding? She’d rehearsed this moment in her imagination since they broke up. Almost a year now and still sometimes she’d think about Tommy like a dog digging up an old bone hoping that some shred of meat or marrow made it worthwhile.

Tommy walked towards her, eyes wide, smile big. Still the same beautiful teeth and a dimple she’d never seen. He’d shaved his beard. When had he done that? His chin was long and knobby-looking, cute the way his nose was cute, long and hooked at the end. He came close enough to shake hands.

“Dish,” he said. “You look great.”

She nodded dumbly, her tongue thick in her mouth. She was afraid if she tried to move her feet, she’d topple.

“How have you been?” he said.

“Good,” she said. What could she say? Something bigger. Something calculated to make him regret having dumped her. Four years they’d worked homicide together; almost three years they’d been lovers. She watched him shift from foot to foot. The silence between them took on mass.

“Yeah,” he said. “You look good.”

“Well,” she said. She groped for her phone. “I’ve got to make a call.”

He took a step closer. “I came here tonight to see you.”

He reached for her hand.

“Don’t,” she said.

“Okay. I deserve that, I guess.” But the look on his face said he didn’t.

Someone laughed at the bar, the same low guttural laugh.

“I got to go,” she said.

Seven steps to the bathroom. She didn’t look back. When the door to the ladies’ closed behind her, she sagged. The nerves in her arms and legs began to tingle and pop.

The door opened.

Tommy stepped inside and the door swung closed. “Three hundred and fourteen days,” he said. “It’s been fucking killing me.”

She turned and faced him. The bathroom light buzzed overhead, made him look even more gaunt than he was. He was too skinny. His beauty was his energy, a face made for laughing, blue eyes throwing off sparks, white teeth flashing, but now he was serious, those eyes pinning hers.

“All this time I missed you so bad, but you know Linda. She could run the CIA. She told me if I got even in the same room with you she’d move back to Wisconsin, take the kids with her.”

He shook his head. Poor Tommy and his poor lost kids.

Eleven months since she’d seen him, and he wanted her to think of the children? Fuck the children. “You’re the reason I lost everything,” she said.

He took her arm, backed her against the wall. This close, his breath on her face, her body remembered how his mouth tasted. She couldn’t take her eyes from his.

“I know,” he said. “Christ, I know. You saved my life.” His voice was low and insistent. “What can I do to make it up to you?”

“Can you get my job back?” she said.

He didn’t even try to lie.

Lennox shook his hand off her arm. “You shouldn’t be in here, Tommy,” she said. “Go home to your wife.”

He put his hands up. “Don’t think I’m giving up on us. I’ll prove to you I’m serious.”

He left. And she turned and braced her hands on either side of the sink. Sipped the fake pine-scented air through parted lips. All those daydreams she’d had about Tommy, what she didn’t take into account was how she’d have to forgive him.

She peed. She washed her hands. She put on lipstick. Then she called her mother.

“Thank God,” Aurora said. Her mother’s voice, but different, not bossy or exasperated or histrionic. She sounded old.

Lennox pressed the cell tighter against her ear. “Are you all right?”

“It’s Bill,” Aurora said. “Bill Pike. I found him.” Her mother’s voice cracked.

“What are you saying?” Lennox said.

“I found his body. The police want to question me.”

Chapter 3

Portland’s proletariat lives on the valley floor hemmed in by the Cascade and Coast Ranges. Over the neighbors’ rooflines or through the branches of the thirty-foot fir trees, you can see a thin strip of sky. The people with money climb up off the floor and get themselves a view. And the highest, best view in the city is at the top of an extinct lava cone called Council Crest. The Pike home was one of several old houses strung out like a necklace along the cliffs.

The last time Lennox had been to the Pikes’ house she was still a kid sitting in the back seat of her folks’ Pontiac. She had wanted to marry the older Pike boy, Dan, since she was in second grade. Dan must have noticed how she followed him around, her face all moony in love, but he never once made fun of her. Eventually, he went off to college. She was fourteen at the time and never saw him again except in the occasional photo. It was all a very long time ago, more than twenty years.

A row of cars was parked in both directions on either side of the road. She found a spot a half-block away. The rain lightened to mist as her boots crunched down the Pikes’ long driveway. She counted the police cars—excessive even for the folks at the top of the hill.

The house was just the way she remembered it from all those years ago. It stood two stories high, clad in stucco with a steep tiled roof lined in white fairy lights. The landscape lights threw a lacework of shadows against the walls of the house up to the second floor. A thin whiff of wood smoke drifted down from the chimney and mixed with the smell of rain.

In the red and blue strobe from the cop cars, Lennox spotted Officer Hyatt standing beneath the garage eaves talking to two guys in valet uniforms: white shirts, black trousers, and windbreakers. The bigger of the two valets shifted from foot to foot, his hands jammed under his armpits. The man’s size and the way he shifted his weight reminded her of someone, and when she drew closer she realized who he was. John Resnik, once the terror of every Safeway in East County, was parking cars at the Pikes’. Who was responsible for that hiring decision?

“How’s it going?” she asked Officer Hyatt. Hyatt was a small man, his hair gone gray. He was a decent cop who’d always treated her like one of the guys.

He nodded at her and told the valets to stay put. He and Lennox walked along the driveway out of earshot of John and the other one.

“What are you doing here?” Hyatt said, his voice big for his body.

“My mother’s here,” she said. “We’re old family friends of the Pikes.”

Resnick stood ten feet from them, an ugly expression on his face. Whatever he was telling the second valet wasn’t good news. The second man shot an evil look in her direction and spat on the pavement.

She grinned and waved at both of them.

Hyatt nodded his head in Resnik’s direction. “What’s the story?”

“The big one’s name is John Resnik. He was convicted of his second armed robbery five years ago,” she said. “My collar. Has a record long as your arm. I haven’t been following his career since he got out of the state pen. What’s he doing up here?”

“Parking cars is what they say,” Hyatt said.

Lennox walked over to the two men. “Hey, John,” she said. “Long time no see.”

“Is that supposed to be funny?” Resnick said.

“Did Mr. Pike know he’d hired a felon to park his friends’ Mercedes?”

“Sure he knew. I’ve been working for him since I got out.”