Unzipped (19 page)

“She takes good care of herself,” I said. Crap! I was so screwed. I glanced about, half expecting Rivera to come roaring out of the bushes, handcuffs at the ready, but he didn’t seem to realize as of yet that I was digging into his past like a daft terrier.

I desperately tried to think of something intelligent to say, but Tricia was laughing, as if I were clever. As if I’d made some kind of joke. I gave her a half-assed grin. She was scratching the retriever behind the ears and spared a hand for Sophie. My mind balked at the idea, but I had to think she might be a genuinely nice person. No wonder Rivera had married her. It had to be nearly impossible for a Neanderthal like him to convince a decent human being to even talk to him. And hell . . . I couldn’t help noticing that her thighs were completely bereft of cellulite. I’d marry her myself given half a chance. But no, wait, I was here to lie to her and try to pry out information about her ex-husband.

“I’m Tricia,” she said and thrust her hand toward me. “Tricia Vandercourt. I don’t think I’ve seen you here before.”

I almost reared back, almost glanced into the bushes again. This was too easy. Life wasn’t supposed to be easy. Hadn’t she ever heard of Catholicism? But I struggled through the simplicity. “Hi.” For a moment I couldn’t quite decide if I should pet Sophie or reach for her hand. I opted for her hand. “I’m—” And then I realized the ugly, glaring truth. I’d spent the drive over debating whether to give her my real name or an alias, and I’d never come to a firm decision. Maybe I hadn’t actually expected her to show up. Maybe I’d thought I wouldn’t get an opportunity to talk to her. Maybe I thought I would be smarter than to just sit there and stare at her like a concussed dumpling. But my mind was spinning hopelessly, screaming suggestions.
Don’t lie. Make something up. Keep it simple. Lie, you moron!
But it wasn’t as if she’d have heard of me. Unless she and Rivera spoke on a regular basis. Unless he liked to trot out all the psychologists he accused of murdering tight ends with Viagra. Unless—Oh, crap. Our hands were already parting. She blinked at me. Her smile was starting to fade at the corners.

“I’m Carla,” I said. “Carla . . . Going.” I have no idea where that name came from.

“Nice to meet you,” she said, and roughed up the retriever’s ears again. “What’s your dog’s name?”

“Sissy.” It didn’t occur to me for several seconds that the dog probably wouldn’t need an alias, but I was on a roll. Quick reactions. That’s what I needed, although intelligence would have come in damned handy. “Sissy Walker.” I don’t know what was wrong with me. Now that I’d gotten a good start, I couldn’t seem to stop.

“She must be registered.”

“Yes.” Why the hell not? “With the greyhound . . . club.” For a moment I actually hoped Rivera would appear and shoot me dead. But wouldn’t you know it; the loser didn’t show up.

“They’re so elegant. Greyhounds,” Tricia explained. “And so loving. It’s a shame how they’re treated.”

Why was I there? Why the hell was I there?

“I thought about adopting one, but my husband wanted to get a rottweiler.”

Husband! That’s why I was there. To learn everything I could about Rivera. To get my ass out of the sling.

“Or something equally terrifying.” She made big eyes at me.

I tried to look seminormal. “Why would he want something terrifying?”

“He’s a cop. Was a cop. Well . . .” She shrugged. The retriever laid its head on her lap and gave her adoring eyes. “He’s still on the force, but we’re not married anymore.”

“Oh.” I felt like a voyeur, but my plan was working. I couldn’t have been more surprised if I’d fallen off the edge of the earth. “I’m sorry.” I wanted to run screaming, but I was there for a purpose, if I could just focus on what it was. “But . . .” I actually forced a sigh as I glanced away. “I know how it is.”

“Are you divorced?”

“Yes.” And I was going to hell. “Three years now.”

“It’s so hard on everyone.”

Everyone? For one wild moment I imagined the worst; Rivera had spawned offspring. “You have kids?”

“No. I’m sorry. I meant the dogs.”

“Oh, yes. Of course.” I gave an intelligent nod. Sophie lay down, crossed one elegant ankle across the other, and looked at me as though I was the village idiot. The dog was smart. Damn smart.

“Was she really attached to your ex?”

I must have given her a sappy expression, because she laughed. “Sissy,” she explained.

Was she calling me names? Was she . . . Oh . . . the greyhound! “No. She didn’t know him long.” Holy crap, I couldn’t remember when I said I’d gotten her. “Not long at all.” I had to quit lying. Absolutely no more lying.

“I know he wanted to take Rockette with him. But he let me keep her.”

“Rockette?” I was floundering hopelessly, like a bloated cow at high tide.

“He wanted a macho dog with a macho name. Butch or Killer or Rocky. I wanted something sweet. We settled on something big.” She smiled. If I didn’t know better I’d think little Tricia wasn’t quite over Rivera. But stranger things had happened. “So he called her Rockette. Because she’s a girl.” Her smile could kill. “It was kind of a joke.”

A joke, from Rivera. Hmmm. It sounded suspicious to me.

“How long have you been divorced?” I asked, trying to give my mind a chance to start functioning.

“Just a couple years.” She gazed at the dog. “We were separated before that. It was really hard. I mean, he’s a great guy and everything.”

It was that statement that made the truth dawn on me; I had the wrong Tricia Vandercourt.

“But he’s so . . .” She made a fist and gritted her teeth. “Irritating.”

Okay, maybe I was on track after all.

“Intense.” She shook her head. “He worried all the time.”

“Worried?”

She shrugged. “About current cases. About work. Not that that’s a bad thing. I mean, he’s a cop and everything. And it wasn’t like he didn’t have time to worry about
me
.” She rolled her eyes. “I could barely get out of the driveway without him running me down to make sure I had . . .” Her hands fluttered. “An assault weapon and a gallon of Mace.”

I couldn’t help but think of the pepper spray in my purse.

“Something like this.” She motioned from herself to me. “Us. Just sitting here talking. This would have driven him crazy. He thought I was too naïve. He didn’t trust anybody. He thought everyone I met was out to get something from me.”

She sighed. I squirmed and tried to refrain from being zapped straight into hell.

“Maybe he was jealous,” I said, because I was jealous. If I had legs like hers, I might even keep them shaved. If she were my client I’d call her ingenuous. In real life she was just damned cute.

“Jealous?” She thought about that for a moment. “No,” she decided, and shook her head. “He was just so . . . suspicious. And I’m . . .” She widened her eyes again. “Well, I’m like this.” She made talking motions with her right hand. “He always said I could make friends with a cactus. At first I thought that was a good thing, but he said a cactus can kill you.” She looked sad and momentarily distant.

Wow. I searched for something to say and came up with, “I suppose being a cop could make him that way.”

“Yeah,” she agreed, sounding dubious. “But I blame it on his dad.”

Father issues. Now we were getting somewhere. The therapist in me perked up. Or maybe it was the cocktail waitress. Both thrive on gossip and emotions, and sometimes I can’t tell them apart. “What was wrong with his dad?”

“He was a bastard. Excuse my French. Still is, probably.”

I nodded, thinking of a half dozen clients. “Fathers are often damaging influences on their sons.”

Her lips parted slightly as if puzzled. “Are you a . . . social worker or something?”

Shit. “A psychologist.” There was no way that could hurt me, and I wasn’t nearly imaginative enough to think up more lies.

“Oh, man.” She brushed back her bangs, looking ridiculously young. “And here I am talking your ear off. I’m sorry.”

“No. No, that’s fine. That’s why I do what I do. I like to listen.”

“Then we could be great pals. ’Cuz I like to talk.” She laughed.

“It’s therapeutic.”

“Gerald didn’t think so. But then, I left him just a few months after starting therapy. Maybe he associates the two. But the problems were already there, of course. I just needed . . . validation, I guess. In fact . . .” She continued, but I failed to hear her for a moment.

“Gerald?” Holy crap, I thought, panicked. I really did have the wrong woman.

She laughed. “He hates it when I call him that. Everyone else calls him Jack. I thought Gerald was a perfectly good name, but it was his father’s and God knows he didn’t want anything to do with that.”

I relaxed marginally. At least I had the right ex-wife, I thought, and maybe, in the back of my mind, I was quite sure no one named Gerald could be all that dangerous. “Did he resent his dad?”

“I don’t know.” She sighed. “His father was in politics. A big advocate for tougher laws and the death penalty and trying kids as adults. Responsibility for all ages or some such rot, but when Gerald got in trouble . . .” She shook her head.

My heart was racing. Our Gerald—in trouble. God forbid. I searched for a means of urging her to go on. “Parents often see other people’s kids and their own kids in an entirely different light.”

“I suppose it’s hard. Me . . .” She laughed. “I’m even protective of my dog.” She gave the retriever another scratch, but her gaze was distant. “His dad managed to keep him out of jail, but sometimes I wonder if he wouldn’t have been better off . . .” She shambled to a halt, but my eyes were probably bugging out of my head by then.

Jail! Rivera!

“He just never let Gerald forget it. You know? Nothing he ever did was good enough.”

My mind wouldn’t adjust.

“What had he done?” My mouth spoke without my mind following along.

“Nothing . . . terrible,” she said and gave a charming little shrug. “But he was young.” She was starting to balk. The therapist in me insisted that I let the session wind down, the cocktail waitress suggested that I call her a cab, and the murder suspect told me to shut the hell up unless I wanted to spend the next twenty years sharing a toilet with a woman named Lancer. “And he got into the wrong crowd. You know how it goes.”

No. Tell me.
I might have been drooling a little. “Adolescence can be difficult.”

“Tell me about it.”

She was probably still an adolescent herself.

“Anyway, the senator got him off the hook, but he never let him forget it. Held it over his head like an ax. Probably still does. He was this giant believer in
discipline
.” She made little quotation marks in the air with her fingers.

“So . . .” I tried to sound casual. “Is that why Gerald went into law enforcement. To discipline like he’d been disciplined?”

“Oh, no.” She looked shocked. Horrified. “He truly wanted to make a difference, to make L.A. a better place to live. Maybe even to keep us safe from what he’d once been. But . . .” She sighed. “God have mercy on anyone who steps out of line, especially if they hurt someone he cares about.”

15

Beauty is only skin deep, but who gives a shit what’s under their skin anyways?

—Michael McMullen

T
HE NEXT FEW DAYS seeped by like stagnant molasses. I took appointments, chugged up Chestnut Hill, and fought with my yard. But I didn’t sleep much. Visions of Rivera slow-cooking me in a giant pot with the rest of L.A.’s criminal element haunted my dreams. But the reasons seemed to shift oddly. One moment he was charging me with invading the privacy of his family life, or ex-family life, and the next he was convinced I was responsible for Bomstad’s engorged death. Either way, being boiled with vegetables was a bad way to go.

I woke up tired and strangely hungry for stew.

But since the scale was stubbornly insistent that I was not yet of Twiggy proportions, I packed up my lunch, boysenberry yogurt and plums, and headed off to work.

Three weeks had passed since Bomstad’s death. They had been the strangest weeks of a relatively strange life. It was a slow Thursday, so I updated files, bought a pack of Virginia Slims, and spent the day thinking of reasons I should smoke it.

By evening I’d opened the package four times and finally thrown the thing in the toilet.

I was just blowing it dry when Mr. Lepinski arrived. I shoved the hair dryer and the smokes in my bottom drawer and ventured into the lobby to meet him.

He looked as wrinkled and timid as ever when he entered my office, but L.A. Counseling had hardly been the stress-free zone I’d intended to make it. Two of his sessions had ended with visits from Bomstad and Rivera. He probably wondered who would drop in tonight.

“Good evening,” I said, giving him my professional smile, all warmth and intellect.

He didn’t smile back. Instead, he twitched his whiskers and sidled into the room.

I waved graciously toward the sofa, hoping to soothe him with my melodious professionalism. He perched on the edge of the couch like a fidgety sparrow and looked like he was ready to fly out the window. Sometimes I’m better at melodious professionalism than others.

“I’ve been thinking about the Bomber,” he said.

I heaved a heavy mental sigh. “What have you been thinking?”

“How he died. Right here.” He shifted his gaze to the floor and back. “It’s just . . . confusing.”

No shit. “How so?”

“He’s gone. And I’m still . . .” His myopic gaze skittered over to me. “Well, I’m still alive, aren’t I?”

I stared at him and carefully pent up my fractious sense of humor. Some find my sarcasm amusing, but I have reason to believe there are others who would be willing to strangle me with a shoelace. Best to keep my cleverness to myself while in session, I decided, especially since it almost seemed as though we were moving past our usual conversations about sandwiches.

“I mean, I was . . . When I was a kid I was asthmatic.” He bobbed a nod in my general direction, though he could no longer meet my eyes. “Did I ever tell you that?”

“No. I don’t believe you did.”