Reckless Disregard (19 page)

She walks over to the ratty sofa, falls into the cushions, and buries her face in her hands. I stand there, my arms outstretched in confusion or maybe supplication. She looks up at me, but she isn’t crying. The blue flecks in her gray eyes radiate pristine light.

“I’m going to tell you why,” she says.

I sit next to her. Maybe, just maybe, after it’s all said, she’ll come back to me.

“When I was twenty years old, I got pregnant.”

The machinery that operates my brain freezes up. I strain to understand what she just said. At the time, she was performing in porn movies. “How did you—?”

“How do you think?”

I reach out to her again. She pulls away and says, “Don’t!”

I suddenly recall a story about how, as a second-year law student, she nearly got into a physical altercation with her pro-life constitutional law professor over abortion rights. “You had an abortion,” I say. “And that’s why you and Professor Sommer—”

“No.”

“That’s not why you went after Sommer?”

“No, I didn’t have an abortion.”

“I don’t—”

“I had a child. Have. He’s ten years old.”

She begins speaking cathartically, delivering a primal confession to the heavenly shrink, one she must have wanted to share forever. She’d been in the business for a year, and there was this film shoot on a yacht in international waters. Unlike most of the other performers, she’d never partied much, but this time she drank and did drugs and forgot to swallow her estrogen/progestin. She did three gangbang scenes worth $1,800 each, so of course didn’t know who the father was. And how could she possibly paternity-test twenty-nine suspects even if she’d wanted to, which she didn’t because they were all slime? When she missed her period, she pretended that doing porn was like long-distance running where the female parts of your body shut down, and when she finally went to the ob-gyn the ultrasound so clearly showed it was a boy. Why had she said yes when the doc asked her if she wanted to know the gender? Once knowing, it somehow felt so wrong to end it (emotion knows no politics), and she waited and waited and waited so long to choose that there was no choice to be made.

“My aunt took him in,” she says. “My mother’s older sister. Like the rest of my mother’s family, she disowned my mom because of my father, hated me even worse for what I was doing. She’d never been married, no kids, so I guess she thought this was her only chance for a family. But there was one condition—my father and I could have nothing to do with the kid, no contact, not even payment of child support. My father told her to go fuck herself, said he’d raise the boy, but . . . I agreed, Parker. Best for all concerned. I was twenty, a child myself, though I’d been doing the least childlike things you can imagine. The boy didn’t know I existed, my aunt told him some bullshit story about. . . . And then, not long ago, she died of a heart attack. Ed and I are his only family. So I gave up my apartment, moved in with my father, quit the US Attorney’s Office, and went back to work for Frantz because he’s letting me have flexible hours.”

The words she doesn’t say reverberate like a saboteur’s bomb:
And I broke it off with you
. But I finally understand. When we were together, I made it no secret that I didn’t want kids, that my childhood was so dysfunctional that I didn’t have the wherewithal to be a parent, that in my late thirties I was getting too old to be a father. She swore that she didn’t want children either, that so many people have kids out of obligation and expectation and not true desire for a family and end up miserable and full of regret. Only, I realize now that she didn’t mean a word of it, and neither did I.

“You should’ve told me,” I say. “I’ll help you with this. I don’t even need to work. Together, we can—”

“That’s exactly why I didn’t tell you, because I knew you’d say that, to be noble.”

“I’m not being noble. I love you.”

She looks at me for a long time with a sad frown. “Everything’s changed. I have a responsibility to my son. And you’re too dangerous.”

My spine straightens with a jolt, as though one of the document experts’ blunt hypodermic needles penetrated the base of my skull. “I don’t have any idea what that means.”

Her shoulders go slack. She takes an audible breath, and fixes her eyes on me wearily. “You court danger. The case against the Sanctified Assembly. And now Poniard. Two people are already dead, your client probably killed them, your life’s in jeopardy, and you keep plowing forward. You make it unsafe for the people around you, and I can’t have that happen to my child.” She sounds like she’s been talking to Joyce Paulsen.

“They’re just lawsuits, Lovely. And you were involved in both of them.”

“Exactly. I was just like you. But not anymore. I can’t afford to be. As for the
Bishop
case, I thought it would be an easy default judgment, a no-brainer. Until you got involved, and then it became perilous for both of us. I won’t expose my child to that. As soon as you’re disqualified—”

“I won’t be.”

“As soon as you’re disqualified, there’ll be a lull. I’ll tell Lou that I’m off the case.” Her eyes, now a slate color, are as unyielding as I’ve ever seen them.

I go to the window and stand with my back to her, watching a 747 with a
Federal Express
logo fly low on its final approach to LAX. Whoever built this hotel did a good job of soundproofing. I can barely hear the jet engines. And yet, the noise is still there, as if I’m perceiving the annoying sound not with my ears but with my skin. No matter how hard you try to shut out the bad things they always seem to find another way in.

She points to the letters. “I hope you’re going to keep those in a safe place. Lou will want them for trial.”

“Count on it.”

She packs up her things and goes to the door. Just before she opens it, I say, “Your son. What’s his name?”

She pauses for a long time, considering whether to share even this innocuous bit of information.

“It’s the only thing I demanded before I let her take him,” she says. “That I be the one to name him, that he keep my last name. At least there would be that. His name is Brighton. Brighton Diamond. He loves to play your client’s horrible game. He’s kind of a master at it actually. Drives me crazy.”

And despite the agonizing pain that oozes out of the marrow in my bones, I actually hear myself laughing out loud as she closes the door.

If William “the Conqueror” Bishop is really who Poniard says he is, how hard would it be for him to send out some of his people to steal Felicity’s letters and make it look like a carjacking? Now that the document examination has ended, I want to stow the letters back into my safety deposit box immediately—no, sooner than that. Fortunately, I’m only a couple of miles away from the bank. Unfortunately, I’m driving not an armored Humvee but an aging Lexus that’s overdue for an oil change.

As I’m about to pull out of the hotel parking lot, my cell phone chimes, announcing a text message from Philip Paulsen.

Meet me at Cranky Franks @ 12:30. I have a lead on Alicia Turner.

What’s up?
I reply.

Can’t talk or text now. Tell you when you get here
.

So instead of going to my bank to secure Felicity’s letters, I drive to Cranky Franks, located downtown near the campus of the University of Southern California. Cranky Franks is one of LA’s historical landmarks—literally. No matter that it’s a hot dog stand that sells the city’s tastiest combination of sodium nitrate, meat trimmings, and fat, and the greasiest French fries in the state. It’s also a monument to LA’s mostly lost vernacular architecture—the stand itself is the shape of a giant hot dog. When, in the early eighties, the landlord announced his intention to evict Cranky Franks and build a parking structure, the neighboring college students nearly rioted, causing the City Council to intervene and give the stand historical-landmark status. In our Macklin & Cherry days, Philip would lead the iron-stomached among us—I was one of them at the time but no longer—on periodic excursions to Cranky Franks, until his wife Joyce made him stop after his first heart attack. Like a lush hiding his alcoholism by hitting the bars mid-afternoon, Philip evidently still sneaks out to Frank’s to satisfy his cravings.

The 105 Freeway is clear, so it takes me only twenty minutes to get to Cranky Franks. There’s never any parking in the area. That’s why the landlord wanted to demolish the hot dog stand and build a new structure—in LA, parking lots generate far more revenue than fast-food joints. So I find a spot several blocks away. Off the college campus, the gangs rule the neighborhood. Cranky Franks isn’t far from where Reginald Denny was beaten during the Rodney King riots of 1992. Rumor has it that the university has made deals with the gangs to keep the immediate neighborhood near the campus safe. I’ve parked significantly out of that safe zone. So even though it’s high noon, I make sure to check my surroundings. I keep my eyes forward and walk quickly, but not so quickly as to seem fearful. At times like this, I thank my mother for developing my acting ability.

A half block from the hot dog stand that wonderful smell of chili and grease hits my nostrils, and I relax when I see the long line of people. I hope that Philip has already ordered a spicy dog with grilled onions and extra chili for me, but that didn’t happen, because his car is parked at the curb twenty yards ahead and he’s inside, waiting for me. If a person can be too polite, Philip Paulsen is.

He must be listening to someone speaking because though he’s looking right at me he doesn’t acknowledge me when I wave at him and shout in a football-tailgating voice, “Hey, Philip, let’s score those dogs.”

So I go up to his car and rap on the passenger-side window and without waiting for a response open the passenger side door. I’m about to slide in next to him when I see the gaping wounds in his chest, the crisscross slashes marking his neck, the crimson stains on his white dress shirt, the hideous blood spatters on the windshield that in the blinding sun I at first mistook for the droppings from a passing flock of crows.

I call the cops and spend the next two hours telling them what I can about the lawsuit and Philip’s involvement in it. Once the medical examiners leave for the morgue with his body, I volunteer to call his wife Joyce, but the cops order me not to and say something about police investigative protocol. So I drive to the bank to secure the Scotty letters in my safety deposit box and then to The Barrista. I have no memory of the car ride, though I must have made it, because I’m standing in the coffee-house storeroom, tears streaming from my face and my left hand aching from the punch I took at the drywall that separates this room from the back office. Just as Joyce said, I’m dangerous—I’m as responsible for Philip’s death as the person who stabbed him.

When Brenda comes into the store, I’m sitting at a table icing my hand and drinking a macchiato. I don’t think to wait until we’re in private but blurt out the news in a half-shout, half-sob. When she comprehends, she stands up and staggers backward a step, gaping at me as though I killed Philip myself. She examines her hands as if checking for blood, looks up, and wordlessly asks the ceiling joists or God above for an explanation. Her eyes overflow, her cut-rate brown mascara tracks muddy twin trails of anguish down her cheeks, and she crumples onto a wooden chair. She cries silently for a minute and then grabs her backpack and hurries out of the shop.

I stay at The Barrista late into the night, working behind the coffee bar, busing tables, ringing up the cash register, and when I return home late that night, I force myself to fight off sleep so that the persistent vision of the slashed-up body of Philip Paulsen won’t invade my dreams as it’s invaded my consciousness. And yet I do sleep and can’t awaken from the gruesome nightmare that seems eternal.

William the Conqueror will pay for this.