Chasing Venus (15 page)

Then she stumbled
toward the guesthouse.

*

Cynthia Rowell opened
her eyes and lay in bed while her pupils adjusted to the semi-dark of her
nocturnal bedroom.
 
Shapes began to
emerge from the shadows.
 
The
scratched-up pine bureau against the wall, a hand-me-down from Arlie’s mother,
his underwear in unkempt mounds poking from the partly opened top drawer.
 
Their framed I HAVE A DREAM poster, with
Martin’s perspiring brow and forefinger raised in defiance.
 
The pile of
dogeared
books on her nightstand, next to the Stones tickets she’d been so happy to get
that afternoon, even if it had taken hours in line.

Then she heard it, what
must have waked her.
 
The phone,
ringing in the kitchen.

She frowned, raised her
head to see the clock beside the ticket envelope.
 
About 2:20.
 
Beside her Arlie snored, dead to the
world.

The floorboards
protested beneath her bare feet and her long gray braid swung behind her head
as she raced across the Berkeley bungalow in her frayed flannel nightgown.
 
She swiped the phone in mid-ring, for
once hoping for a crank call.
 
Not
the other kind that tended to come in the middle of the night.
 
“Hello?”

A voice broke through a
sob.
 
“Mom?”

So this call was one of
the other kind.
 
Cynthia’s heart
nosedived.
 
“What is it, sweetie?”

“Something
terrible’s
happened.”

“I’m coming over.”
 
She nearly hung up, then heard the thin
disembodied voice through the phone line.

“You can’t.
 
I’m not home.”

Cynthia returned the
receiver to her ear and clutched it with both hands, wanting to hold on tight
to something.
 
“Wait a minute, are
you in the car?
 
Where are you?
 
I don’t care where it is, I’m coming.”

“No, Mom, I mean
it.
 
You can’t.”

Annie was really crying
now.
 
Listening to the wracked sobs,
tears rose to Cynthia’s own eyes.
 
It never got easier, it never did.
 
Her child was thirty years old but still it twisted her gut to hear her
pained cries; still she’d go to the ends of the earth to stop them.
 
These days that might be what it
took.
 
The problems were so much
harder now, nothing that could be easily patched over, like scraped knees or
dolls with twisted limbs.

Annie was
speaking.
 
“I’m all right, Mom.
 
But you’re not going to see me for a
while.”

“Why not?
 
What are you talking about?”

“It’s Michael.”
 
Annie’s voice sputtered and choked.
 
“He’s … he’s dead.”

God, no.
 
Though a part
of her had guessed it even before the words were spoken.

“You’re going to hear
things,” her daughter said.
 
Her
voice steadied then, as if she were getting down to business.
 
“I didn’t do it, Mom.”

“I know you didn’t,
honey.”

“Everyone will think I
did.
 
I have to prove I didn’t.”

Cynthia didn’t like the
sound of that.
 
She began to shake
her head.
 
“No.
 
You can’t do that on your own.
 
Come home and we’ll—”

“I can’t come
home.
 
They’ll arrest me.”

Cynthia couldn’t argue
with that.
 
She knew it was
true.
 
Cops with their rules and
their uniforms and their tear gas and their closed minds.
 
They’d never listened to her or Arlie or
any of their friends; why would they listen to her daughter?

Arlie came into the
kitchen then, his gray hair mussed, wearing the threadbare drawstring
sweatpants he’d been sleeping in for a decade.
 
He scratched the back of his head, his
brow furrowed in drowsiness and confusion.
 
His once-black chest hair had turned to salt and pepper and the skin on
his belly sagged.
 
My husband is an old man
, Cynthia
thought, for a moment torn from her daughter’s concerns.
 
When had that happened?
 
Yesterday they’d both been young.

Through the phone line,
Cynthia heard Annie say the words she’d said to her own mother in years past,
the words that never accomplished what they tried.
 
“Don’t worry.”

“Annie, just come
home.”

“I can’t.
 
I have to go.
 
But don’t worry, I have a plan.”

Cynthia heard the
whoosh of another car passing Annie’s vehicle.
 
She sensed her daughter distancing
herself, getting set to do what she felt she must.
 
Cynthia wanted to hold on but couldn’t.
 
Like the years, there was nothing to
grasp, no way to stop the forward motion.

Another passing car
noise.
 
Then, “I love you.
 
Arlie, too,” and with a parting sob
Annie disconnected.

Cynthia didn’t have to
move far across the worn linoleum to find her husband’s arms, which despite the
decades were still warm and strong.
 
He wasn’t her daughter’s father but he’d been doing the job like a pro
for years, far better than the so-called “real dad” ever had.
 
Cynthia saw the love in her man’s
welling eyes before she lay her head against his chest and let her tears
moisten his skin.

*

Reid didn’t think Hollywood
showed to advantage in sunlight, even the soft dewy sunlight that crept over
the LA basin at 7 AM.
 
He halted his
Ford pickup at a red light and surveyed the trash scattered in the gutters, the
toppling Cyclone fences surrounding empty rock-strewn lots, the pawn shops and
bail bondsmen and barred-up convenience stores that called Hollywood home.
 
It was ironic that this place got
labeled
Tinseltown
.
 
He figured it couldn’t have been a local
who’d come up with that moniker.

He often sneaked a dawn
peek at La
La
Land since he liked to get to work
early, even if he knew the day would run well into the evening.
 
Holdover from his cop era, he
supposed.
 
It was impossible for him
to feel on top of things if he was strolling in at noon.
 
Plus, with what they paid him, he
couldn’t justify 8-hour days.
 
It
was so much more than he used to earn as a cop and in those days he’d worked a
hell of a lot harder.
 
He could
never put in enough hours to make his
Crimewatch
salary make sense.
 
So a lot of it
he gave away, usually to charities related to law enforcement or victims’
rights.
 
Maybe that made him a
one-trick pony.
 
He didn’t much
care.
 
He just wanted to do what he
could to forward law and order, try to put some justice back in the world.

The light turned green
and his foot found the accelerator.
 
He cruised down a nearly deserted Sunset Boulevard, heading for the
Crimewatch
studios and pondering the two
private entities to which he also regularly contributed.
 
One was his family, only some of whom
resisted his generosity.
 
The other
was Donna’s.

Not that it made up for
anything, he knew.
 
What they wanted
was their girl back and that he could never give them.
 
Still, if he could make sure—and
he could—that their mortgage payments were met, that the family could
swing a few weeks’ vacation every summer, that her mom could manage the
occasional Nordstrom shopping spree, he’d do it.
 
Gladly.
 
Wishing he could do more.

As for his family, most
of his largesse was aimed at his parents but little of it hit the mark.
 
His father, retired from the LAPD, was
as proud as his first-born son and even more stubborn.
 
Though he’d softened a bit of late.

Briefly Reid shut his
eyes.
 
The prostate-cancer diagnosis
was about as good as those things got.
 
His dad had the slow-moving kind, the
leave-it-alone-because-it-won’t-be-what-kills-you kind.
 
Still.
 
It was a jolt to the family, who was
much more used to enemies you could see, enemies you battled with your gun and
your badge, and beat every time you ended a shift still breathing.

Reid’s dad hadn’t
thought much of his son’s
Crimewatch
gig at first.
 
Robert Gardner’s idea
of good TV was live sports, classic syndicated shows like M*A*S*H, and for some
mysterious reason the Weather Channel.
 
Plus, the elder Gardner thought that cops should do what cops should do,
the old-fashioned way, which had nothing to do with cameras and klieg
lights.
 
But when
Crimewatch
started nabbing fugitives and
got a few takedowns straight off the FBI’s Most Wanted List, Reid’s dad started
singing a different tune.
 
Now he
loved
Crimewatch
and had all the
merchandise to prove it: the tee shirt, the mug, the bumper sticker.
 
He had to be the show’s biggest fan, a
fact which made Reid smile every week he taped a new installment.

Reid made a left onto
the side street where the studios were housed in a nondescript two-story
commercial building without signage.
 
Unlike the local news stations that dotted the area, there was no
splashy billboard on the corner advertising this as
Crimewatch
territory.
 
For security purposes, the show preferred to keep a low profile.
 
Safety concerns explained the tall iron
fence, topped by barbed wire, that delineated the perimeter, and the bars on
every window, including those on the second floor.
 
In an hour or so, the security-guard
detail would show up for duty.
 
There was one huge piece of equipment that did mark the structure as a
broadcast facility: a massive satellite dish out back.
 
Still, in Hollywood that didn’t garner
much notice.

Reid halted the truck
midway down the ramp that sloped to the subterranean garage and fumbled for the
key card that would retract the locked door.
 
Maybe, he thought, he should go with his
dad to the next oncologist appointment.
 
That way he could pose a few questions to someone who might actually
give him a few straight answers.
 
He
was extending his left arm out the truck’s open window toward the key-card box,
considering his schedule for the next few weeks, when a hand reached out from
nowhere and grabbed his wrist.

“Shit!”
 
He yanked his arm free as a woman’s
face—pale, haggard—appeared at his window.
 
“Dammit!”
 
He cursed himself, his heart pumping
like a racehorse’s crossing the finish line.
 
He had too many enemies to be letting
down his guard, particularly right outside the studios, the first place anybody
hunting him would look.
 
Then he
focused on the face outside his truck and couldn’t believe who he was
seeing.
 
“Annie?”

She looked around
frantically.
 
“You’ve got to help
me, Reid.
 
I don’t have anywhere
else to turn.”

Christ, she looked like
she’d just escaped the asylum.
 
Hair
every which way, eyes wild, rust-colored smears on her cheeks.
 
And, he noticed, on her neck and arms.

He frowned.
 
“What’s that you’ve got on you?”

“Blood.”
 
Her eyes welled.
 
“Michael’s blood.
 
He’s dead.”
 
Then she executed another of those
crazed spins, looking around as if she were a trapped animal desperately
seeking a way out.

“What?”
 
His brain was having trouble processing
the words she’d spoken.
 
“Michael,
your friend in the wheelchair?
 
He’s
dead?”

Now she was grabbing
onto the door handle.
 
Quickly she
got the door open and hoisted herself inside the truck’s cab.
 
“You’ve got to help me in,” she repeated
as she clambered over him.
 
“There’re too many people around.
 
I can’t let anybody see me.”

She was unbelievably
nimble.
 
That, combined with her
small size and his morning-slow reaction time, allowed her to crawl over him
and get into the passenger seat.
 
As
she passed, stinking of blood and sweat, she nearly gave him a shiner with her
elbow.

By this point he wasn’t
sure he wanted this woman within a mile of him, let alone in the cab of his
truck.
 
But there she was.
 
“How the hell did you get Michael’s
blood on you?” he demanded.

She turned her head
away to stare out the windshield.
 
Her lower lip trembled.
 
“I
was staying at his house.
 
I found
him after he was …”
 
She stopped.