Four Friends (27 page)

“Well, I could explain that, but if you don’t mind...”

“I’m sorry, BJ,” Gerri said. “You’re obviously traumatized by that whole circus we witnessed. Maybe someday when you’re feeling a little more in control and comfortable we’ll have that conversation.”

“That kind of thing happen to you a lot?” BJ asked, taking a sip of her wine.

“When I’m not working? Only once before, almost an identical scenario. It was ten or twelve years ago, if I remember. Another domestic in a parking lot, but I was alone. I had stopped off for groceries on the way home and it happened right in front of me. I didn’t have a cell phone. I had to go back into the store. The manager and bag boy held them apart until the police could come.” She leaned forward. “I see things professionally. I used to get in a lot of tight spots when I was doing more home visits. But it’s what I do—it’s not something I can turn on and off. You know?”

“Of course you can’t,” Andy said. “So—they took him away?”

“And one of the cops gave her a card with a phone number on it. If she’s up to it, if she’s had enough and isn’t too terrified, she might call it.”

“Did you get their names?” BJ asked.

“As a matter of fact, I did. I thought I should know, in case they need a witness. The police charged him.”

“Do you ever, you know, run ’em up? Check out the record? Check and see how things come out?”

“I don’t have access to police files, but I never have any trouble getting whatever information I need,” Gerri said. “We’re pretty well connected at CPS.”

“Maybe you’ll check,” BJ said. “If you do, maybe you’ll just tell us that he didn’t kill her or anything.”

“Listen, it wasn’t nice, what happened tonight. But I don’t think we have to worry that her life’s in immediate danger. Long-term danger is more likely. She’ll go to her mother’s or sister’s, he’ll face battery charges, probably misdemeanor, make up with her, and this event will repeat itself several times before they either break up or something worse happens. It’s true, it’s a deadly game, but not every domestic ends that way, BJ.”

“But you’ll check?” she asked.

“Would it make you feel better?”

“It would. If I hadn’t seen it, it wouldn’t matter. But I saw it. And I tried to get you to walk away from it. So now...”

“Okay. It’ll be all right, but I’ll check and let you know.”

“Thanks.”

“I’m sorry,” Gerri said. “It must have been so difficult.”

“Tonight?” BJ asked.

“All of it.”

“Yeah. But it’s okay now.” She smiled her crooked smile. “I got loose.”

“Good for you,” Gerri said. “You all okay now?” she asked, her gaze connecting with each of the women in turn.

“I want to be you when I grow up,” Sonja said. “I want to be strong like you. You’re invincible.”

Gerri laughed. Remarkable, she’d been feeling so powerless about her personal situation, having completely forgotten that she’d been programmed to react in crises like the one she encountered. It was the crisis at home she wasn’t trained to manage. “Maybe I’ve just turned into a crusty old broad,” she said.

“You?” Andy said. “Anything but.” Andy pushed back her chair. “You’re just amazingly efficient and Sonja’s right, you are very strong.”

“We’re all stronger than we realize. You girls ready to give it up? I’m shot.”

Chairs scuffled back. Women stood. BJ touched her arm. “Listen, your husband. I tried like hell to hate him tonight, but it was hard. He seems like a pretty decent guy, first glance. He was real concerned about me. He could tell I was upset and he... He tried to be nice, you know? Got me a drink, told me to relax, reassured me that you knew exactly what you were doing.”

“He’s a very decent guy,” Gerri said. “That puts a strain on me.”

“Well, thanks for what you did,” she said. “Before that happened, it was one of the nicest nights I’ve had in a long time. Maybe ever.”

“Hey, we’ll do it again real soon. I mean, what are the odds of trouble again, huh? Just send Jessie home, will you? And watch her out the front door till she gets here?”

When the door was closed on the women, Gerri went to the office she’d been sharing with Phil for fifteen years. He was focused on the computer screen. She walked up behind him, put her hands on his shoulders.

“I need some information right away. I need you to get it for me. I could go through channels, but I don’t want to wait and it’s important,” she said.

“Tonight’s event?” he asked.

“Sort of. I want you to find out if Barbara Jean Smith of Fresno is in the system.”

He swiveled his chair around to face her. “Your new friend?”

“She overreacted tonight. It’s obvious she’s been the victim of abuse. Maybe there was a court case or something. I can wait till she lets it out, but if you don’t mind.”

“Sure,” he said, turning back to the computer. “Age?”

“About thirty-five. Give it a three-year span.”

All he had to do was log in to the prosecutor’s office database. It would take quite a bit of searching, but Phil was accomplished at multitasking. While he got under way, she went to the chair at her end of the desk. “You okay with what happened tonight?” he asked.

“It was kind of routine, sad to say. The only things that got to me in a big way were BJ’s and Sonja’s reactions.”

“Sonja do okay?”

“Too okay,” she said. “She’s had a complete personality change. It makes me wonder what’s happening to her in private, when no one’s around to see her react to this shift her life has taken. By the way, BJ confessed to me that she’s having trouble hating you. You must have been very nice to her.”

He turned in his chair. “Does everyone in the world know what I did?”

“I think so,” she said. “I told my girlfriends. I haven’t told them at work yet. They’re too busy to care. They’re oblivious.”

He turned back to the computer, reapplying his reading glasses, clicking away. “You told my mother.”

She laughed. “Has she been in touch?”

“She’s making my life miserable....”

“Ahh...” There was a definite sound of satisfaction.

“She’s threatening to visit.”

“That would be nice,” Gerri said, smiling to herself. “We haven’t had a common enemy in years.”

“It would finish me off.”

“You said you’d do anything,” she reminded him.

“I did,” he said, scrolling through documents. “I was thinking public evisceration, castration, mutilation—not my mother.”

“She adores you.”

“Not lately,” he said. He turned back to her, plucking off his specs. “She suggested I buy you some flashy jewelry, take you on a trip to the islands or something.”

“Really? Why didn’t you offer that?”

“Because I knew your idea of amends would be much closer to the soul—like moving me out. Telling my mother.” She laughed at him and he turned back to the keyboard, the screen. “You’re getting too much pleasure out of my comeuppance,” he said.

“It has been interesting, I admit. Listen, I had to tell Muriel. One of the kids was going to slip. You understand that.”

“I know better than to suggest constrictions, Gerri. You do what you do. I’ll grovel. I think that’s the recipe here.”

“Oh, you make a fabulous victim,” she said. “I’m sick of laughing about this. I’m still pissed off.”

“Yeah, I know. You’re—” He stopped talking and studied the computer screen. “Two hundred and nine arrests of women named Barbara Jean Something between the ages of thirty-three and thirty-six. Note to self. Our kids can’t name any of our grandkids Barbara Jean.” He scrolled through arrest documents slowly, reading the screen. Then he turned his chair away from the computer and pulled off his glasses. “I don’t think you’re ready for this.”

“What?” Gerri asked, standing and moving away from her chair. She glanced over his shoulder and read the screen. “Dear God,” she whispered.

There on the screen was BJ’s picture. And a headline. Barbara Jean Smith Spraque Stands Trial for Husband’s Murder.

ten

IF THERE WAS one gift in the news about BJ, it was that Phil’s office had not prosecuted her—it happened in a different county. He logged off the prosecutor’s database and left the rest to Gerri. Once he was gone she got back on the computer, researching news articles about Barbara Jean Spraque—Smith was her maiden name. And she stayed at it until 2:00 a.m.

There were undoubtedly many more details to the story, but the gist was she’d been battered by her husband. Married at eighteen, a mother at twenty-three, she was hospitalized several times. Her husband went to jail on occasion, though never for long. He was charged multiple times with battery as well as other offenses. By the time BJ’s children were four and six years of age, he’d been hitting, shoving and shaking them, as well, and she’d tried just about everything from orders of protection to shelters. And then on one dark and dangerous night shortly after he’d hit them all again, he started to party with a few of his friends...and lots of alcohol, pot and his favorite, cocaine. BJ put her children to bed, told them not to leave the room for any reason, and she served the drinks. She added small amounts of cocaine to her husband’s drinks all night. Then, late that night, right about the time most of his friends had either moved on or passed out, she fixed his final cocktail. She scraped a large amount of coke into his drink. According to her own testimony, he was a big man and she was afraid it hadn’t been enough. When he passed out, she loaded her children into the car and drove to her mother’s house where she waited for her husband to find her and beat her senseless, or for the police to arrest her.

BJ’s attorney pled her charges down to manslaughter, and she had served three years in a women’s state penitentiary—Chowchilla. The timeline suggested she’d moved to Mill Valley right out of prison.

She was just reunited with her kids after three years of separation.
No wonder she’s so private,
Gerri thought. She was skittish around people, no doubt afraid they’d find out. Gerri couldn’t imagine what that might be like—constantly worrying the kids would pay again and again as neighbors, people around school, looked at them as the offspring of a murderer. And children could be so unbelievably cruel. If the news got out, it could be horrible. BJ had undoubtedly prepared herself to do a lot of moving around.

In over twenty-five years with CPS, this was only the second time Gerri had been faced with a situation this dramatic. Phil had been involved prosecuting similar cases a number of times. Gerri had supported him when it tore him up, prosecuting a woman for a crime she had to commit to stay alive, to keep her kids alive. To his credit, when moral if not legal innocence was implicit, he did whatever he could to keep the sentencing reasonable. But the law is the law. Killing is not justified unless you’re in
immediate
danger.

They’d had their share of arguments about that, naturally. Gerri was convinced the perspective of the law and the prosecutor’s office were based in testosterone. Of
course
men didn’t kill sleeping men! They’d have a gun or a knife handy for that next attack and the self-defense would be indisputable. The thought of that couple in the parking lot came to her mind. What was a five-foot-three, one-hundred-pound woman supposed to do to defend herself against a six-foot-three, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound man? Unless she had some kind of special training, he’d take her weapon away from her and use it on her before she could even aim.
Special training, hah!
Gerri knew abused women couldn’t sign up for marksman training or karate. In most cases, they were barely allowed to use the phone.

And yet it was the thing women and men alike always said they’d do if they couldn’t escape the abuse—kill the son of a bitch. Gerri had always said she would. She wouldn’t live under that kind of oppression. She’d go to prison to keep her children safe. Phil said if his daughter was in such a situation and couldn’t get out, was hopelessly locked in and ruthlessly battered, he’d kill the son of a bitch.
Talk, talk, talk.
When truly faced with it, how many people actually
could?

If Gerri was a betting woman, she’d lay odds that BJ had known exactly what was going to happen to her. She knew she’d be tried and convicted of something if not murder one. She knew she’d go to prison. And yet it must have seemed the only option left to her. Better Mommy in prison than everyone in the ground.

Gerri knew there would come a time when she would ask her about that. She wouldn’t tell even Andy what she’d learned, but she would eventually level with BJ. Gerri wanted to know how she could have been sure her children would be safe while she was locked up. How did she know she’d get them back? Who was on her side? Obviously she had her brother’s support—but what had happened to the husband’s family? The abuser’s kin were notorious for denial, for going after the killer until the end of time. And that house—whose house was it really? Gerri could barely remember the original owners and didn’t know if it had sold privately, without signs or open houses. Then Gerri realized the last renter had been a single mom who also kept to herself.
Hmm—a recovery house? Owned by some philanthropist?

Too stirred up to sleep, she took a rather large brandy to bed. She turned on the TV but it didn’t drown out her thoughts, all jumbled up in a mess that included BJ then and now, the couple in the parking lot, her job.

Inevitably, her thoughts moved to her own situation and her friends and their marriages—all in various states of flux. Andy and Bryce were over and it seemed like Sonja and George were headed that way, as well, for entirely different reasons.

She thought maybe she and Phil might salvage something, but she had a secret and desperate fear—that they’d get back together, sleep in the same bed, talk about the stock market while naked in the bathroom, attend the kids’ college graduations and weddings as proud parents and then, after they’d done all the work, done all they could, they’d give up in exhaustion because getting it back wasn’t possible. And starting over was just a romantic idea that couldn’t be achieved.

* * *

With the end of school, the early morning walks had been suspended for the neighborhood women. Andy had no reason to rise at the crack of dawn, Sonja was sleeping in these days and occasionally Gerri got out there by herself, but she was slacking, taking great pleasure in the days she could languish in bed until seven or seven-thirty.