A Playdate With Death (23 page)

“Are you okay?” I said. “What’s wrong? Are you feeling all right? Should I pull over?”

He shook his head and cleared his throat once again.
“I’m . . . I’m very sorry. Truly. And I’ll understand if you don’t want to partner with me anymore.”

I took a quick right into the parking lot of a big box store and pulled the car into a spot. I turned off the engine and turned to face him. Looking him full in the eye I said, “What the hell are you talking about?” Although I knew. Of course I knew.

“My gun. I let that kid get hold of my gun. You could have been killed. I let him overpower me, and I endangered both our lives.”

To a man who had always been as physically powerful as Al, the vulnerability that comes with age must be devastating. How impossibly painful it is to acknowledge that you are no longer able to protect yourself and others, when that has always been your primary occupation, the source of your identity. If your physical strength is one of your paramount skills, what must it feel like when that begins to go?

I’d often wondered how it was that Al made the transition from law enforcement to defense investigation so easily. It had never seemed to bother him that his job was no longer to protect and defend but rather to work toward the release of those who he’d once been so committed to incarcerating. Sitting next to him in the car, I understood that it had only seemed to come naturally to him. Perhaps the job of defense investigator had enough of the trappings of the police—he investigated, he searched, sometimes at least, for truth—that he could feel like he was still in the business of protecting people. At the moment when Matthew wrenched the gun from his hand, Al must suddenly have confronted the fact
that not only was his job no longer to protect the public, but he was no longer even able to protect himself and those he cared about in the way he once had.

“You didn’t
let
him get your gun,” I said. “You didn’t let him do anything.”

Al shook his head and knotted his old man’s hands, gnarled like tree branches, in his lap. His index finger was swollen and red. There was something very wrong with it.

I reached out my own hand and rested it ever so gently on his. He flinched slightly. “Al, listen to me. I know this is hard. I know twenty years ago, hell, even ten years ago, Matthew would never have gotten your gun away from you—”

Al grunted. “He should never have been able to lay a hand on my gun. Not then, and not now. Never.”

“Al, the guy’s in his early twenties. He’s strong and young and out of his mind. Crazy people are capable of amazing feats of strength; you know that. He was desperate, and he got lucky. I mean, look at your hand! He snapped your finger! There’s no way you could have held on to the gun.”

Al stared at his swollen finger and gave it an angry shake. He immediately winced in pain.

“I’ve got to get you to a doctor to have that taken care of. It looks excruciating.”

He looked for a moment like he was going to object, then he shrugged. “Don’t worry. I’ll get it looked at. Some bodyguard, huh?”

“You’re not my bodyguard. You’re my
partner.
”

He raised his eyebrows at me. I waved him off. “Look, I want to break this news to Michelle and Betsy in person. You coming?” I asked. He nodded. “Should we stop at an emergency room?”

“Let’s do it later,” Al said. “If we go now, we’ll be there all day waiting for them to deal first with the coke-head gang-bangers bleeding to death.”

That’s my buddy Al, always able to toss a slur even in the midst of exquisite agony.

Before I pulled out of the parking lot, I handed him my cell phone and asked him to call Big Bear and let everyone know that the police had Matthew in custody and that the kids were no longer in danger. Al spoke quickly to Jeannelle—Peter and Robyn had taken the kids out for a hike—and then I called Michelle. I tracked her down at her lab. I didn’t want to tell her on the phone, so I asked her if we could come see her.

As soon as Michelle met Al and me in the lobby of her building, she ushered us back through the double doors marked Authorized Personnel Only to a small office kitchenette. She pulled a first aid kit out of a cupboard and held out her hand for Al’s. With a quick snap, she’d straightened out his finger. He’d winced briefly, but by the time she’d taped it to a tongue depressor, he was smiling.

“Thank you, dear. You just saved me about three hours and three hundred bucks at the ER.”

She said, “It was just dislocated, but I’m happy to oblige. Actually, I like being reminded that I’m also a real doctor now and again.”

Al and I took Michelle up on her offer of coffee, and we sat at the Formica table in the sterile little kitchenette and told her how her brother had died. She cried, but it seemed as much with relief as sorrow. Knowing that Bobby hadn’t killed himself, and knowing why Matthew had murdered him, gave her some sense of peace. More, certainly, than she’d had before.

“It just seems so pointless,” she sighed, wiping tears from her eyes.

“It almost always is, in my experience,” I said. “People never kill each other for very good reasons. It’s usually about love, or jealousy, or some horrible misunderstanding. And it never feels justified to those left behind.”

Michelle asked me to leave it to her to tell her family, and I was only too happy to agree. After my recent conversation with her father, I’d been dreading seeing him again. And we still had to break the news to Betsy.

I called Betsy from the car but got a busy signal, so we just headed over to Hollywood.

Betsy’s door was opened by the same man who had been there when last I’d seen her. He had a cigarette clenched in his teeth, and he squinted his eyes against the smoke curling from the end. He was holding a roll of packing tape in one hand and a thick magic marker in the other.

“Yes?” he said. “Oh, right. The detective girl.”

Al nudged me in the side with his elbow, but I ignored him. “I’m a lawyer, actually. Is Betsy around?”

Roy took the cigarette out of his mouth and ground it out in a little white saucer that looked like it had been
serving as his ashtray for quite a while. “Nobody told you?” he said.

“Nobody told me what?”

“About Betsy?”

My stomach knotted in dread. “What happened?” I asked.

“Betsy had a positive urine test. Her probation officer had her arrested.”

I wasn’t surprised. I looked around the shambles of the living room. Cardboard boxes rested on every available surface.

“You’re packing?” I asked.

“She asked me to. Her lawyer told her she’s looking at a few months in county, at the minimum. Since she’s getting evicted at the end of the month, she asked me to take care of her stuff for her. I’m putting it all into storage.”

“She’s going to jail?” I asked. “Not into a drug treatment facility?”

He nodded. “Sick, isn’t it? I mean, the woman has a disease, but instead of giving her the medicine and therapy she needs, they throw her in jail. Where, incidentally, she’ll be able to get as much crank as her little heart desires.”

I shook my head. “Ridiculous.”

I could feel Al aching to put his two cents into the conversation, surely to comment on how using drugs is against the law and people who break the law deserve to go to jail, but I silenced him with a glare. The last thing I was interested in at the moment was one of our trademark political debates.

“Are you planning on visiting her?” I asked.

“Once they let me, yeah, I will.”

I told him what had happened and asked him if he would be willing to pass word on to Betsy. I also promised that I’d go to county jail to visit her.

I guess I wasn’t surprised that Betsy hadn’t managed to stay sober. Most addicts don’t. Drug addiction is a complicated thing. It seems to take some remarkable combination of support, security, and will to kick the habit. And even with all that to help them, many people still end up locked into a cycle of using that destroys them and those around them. I hoped Betsy would survive her months in county and come out with the strength and desire to try again. I wasn’t about to lay any money on it, though.

A
L
and I drove down La Brea toward my house in silence. Finally, as I pulled in the driveway, I said, “Okay, I’ll do it.”

He looked at me, puzzled. “Do what?”

“Go into business with you. But in a really limited way.”

“Go on.”

“First of all, I need completely flexible hours. I mean, I’ve got to be able to pick Ruby up at school, take care of Isaac, take the kids to playdates. All that.”

He shrugged. “That’s fine by me. Work when you want to work.”

“And I don’t want to commit to a firm number of hours or anything like that. If you need some legal research done, and I’m free, then I’ll do it. But I can’t promise anything.”

“What an attractive offer,” he said.

“Those are my terms. I don’t really want to go back to work, anyway. I’m a stay-at-home mom. I’m happy that way.”

“Sure you are.”

I decided to ignore that. “How are you going to pay me?”

“I’m not.”

“What?”

“I’m not going to pay you. The clients will pay you. If I’ve got work for you, and you can fit me into your busy schedule, then you’ll do the work and we’ll bill the client. Whatever they pay me for your time, I’ll give to you.”

“Okay. That sounds fair. Oh, and one more thing.”

“What?”

“I’m not carrying a gun. Ever.”

“We’ll see about that.”

“I’m serious, Al.”

“Okay, okay.”

“Do we have a deal?”

“Yes, I believe we do.”

We shook on it.

After Al went home, it occurred to me that it might be a good idea to have some welcome-home presents waiting for the kids. Actually, the most important person to reward was probably Peter. I headed out to the Toys “R” Us on La Cienega, across from the Beverly Center, and meandered up and down the aisles for a while. I found a truly disgusting doll for Ruby that would pee after drinking a bottle and poop after being fed a special powdered pap (sold separately). She would love it. I picked out a Johnny Lightning Speed
Racer Mach 5 for Peter. As for Isaac, it didn’t take me long to find the perfect gift. When I got home, I wrapped everything in some Chanukah paper I found under my bed and sat down at the kitchen table to wait.

It took them quite a while to make it down from Big Bear—it had snowed that morning—and, finally, I was bored enough to whip up a batch of chocolate chip cookies. I had eaten my way through half the cookie dough and most of the cookies, too, when I heard the car pull into the driveway. I ran down the back stairs and greeted them as they tumbled out. The kids were squealing and ruddy-cheeked from their adventures in the snow. Peter looked exhausted and very happy to be home. We hugged, kissed, and staggered up the stairs with all their bags and boxes.

Sitting on the floor in the living room, my husband and I cuddled as Ruby and Isaac tore the wrapping paper off their presents.

“You okay?” Peter asked.

“Now I am,” I said, kissing him on the cheek.

Suddenly, Isaac screamed in delight. “A gun! A real gun! A gun! A gun! A gun!”

“A gun?” Peter was obviously shocked.

“A purple water pistol,” I said.

“Don’t we have a rule against guns?”

“Relax,” I said. I picked my son up onto my lap and kissed him on his round, soft cheek. “Isaac and I know it’s just pretend. Right, Isaac?” He took aim at me with the purple pistol, right between the eyes, and squeezed off a round, point-blank.

“Pow,” Isaac said. “You’re dead.”

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