Unzipped (21 page)

I was feeling shaky. I steadied my knees and refused to back away. I was a professional. I was above this. “I didn’t come here for a piss—” I drew a deep breath and started again. “I didn’t come here to trade insults,” I said.

“No?”

“No.”

“Then why are you here?”

“I told you—” I began, but calmed my voice and drew my back a little straighter. “I realize my evaluation of Mr. Bomstad was somewhat skewed. But—”

He snorted. I demonstrated remarkable restraint and refrained from knocking him against the wall with my purse.

“But,” I continued, “I believe that amongst the lies, he did offer me a modicum of truth.”

“And you believe that based on your own phenomenal ability to judge character?”

I ignored that. “And therefore,” I continued evenly. “I am certain I am capable of helping you find his diary if given a chance.”

“Ahh. The diary again. Great,” he said. “Help away. Where do you think it might be?”

In his house. In his bedroom, I thought, but I had no desire to tell him that. Maybe it was because, as a professional, I had a deep-seated need to see my work fulfilled, to justify my belief that all people have a grain of goodness in them, and therefore Bomstad had told me some truth. Or maybe I was just being pissy and wanted to find the damn thing myself. Whatever the case, I kept my cool and stood my ground. I am woman. Hear me roar! “It would be helpful,” I said, “if I could see his living quarters. Refine my perceptions. As his therapist, I might be able to decipher clues that police officers would find insignificant.”

“Of course,” he said, “us ham-fisted blue-collar workers might trample the Bomb’s delicate treasures under our muddy heels.”

“Tell me . . . Lieutenant.” I was struggling to continue to call him by his title. Turns out mutilating his name had been the highlight of an otherwise shitty few weeks. “Are you trying to perpetuate the police department’s barbaric persona?”

“Tell me, miss,” he said, “isn’t it hard to walk with that stick up your—”

A knock sounded at the door. Rivera kept glaring at me as he granted entrance.

It was the boxy girl, looking strangely thrilled, I thought, to see us faced off across a narrow scrap of industrial carpet. Her gleaming brown eyes skimmed from him to me and back. “Call for you on line two, Lieutenant.”

He grunted something, and she delayed just a second before pulling her squat body back into the hall and closing the door regretfully behind her. She could just as well have said “aw, shucks” and scuffed the floor with her sneaker. But such was the maturity level of the LAPD.

And so our stare-down continued.

“Is there anything else, Miss McMullen?” I wasn’t sure when he had switched to calling me miss, and although I’ve often thought women’s rights were a lot of hooey—I mean, if a guy wants to open a door—I found that antiquated form of address disturbingly disturbing.

“No, Mr. Riviter,” I said, “I think I’ve learned just about everything I need to know about you.”

“That about sums it up,” he said and reached for the phone.

I couldn’t help but stop him. “What does that mean?”

“Can’t even get my name straight,” he said, “and you think you know everything about me. Seems about right for someone in your line of work.”

I opened my mouth to argue, but he was already answering the phone, and I was far too classy to either listen in or wrap the telephone wire around his neck until his eyes popped.

So there wasn’t much point in sticking around.

17

Men are like dogs. Some are . . . Well, men are just like dogs.

—Chrissy McMullen

I
WAS IN a Friday afternoon session with a self-proclaimed sex addict when an idea came to me. There had once been a time when I thought there was no such thing as a sex addict. Or, maybe, more correctly, I used to think every man was a sex addict, but after meeting Raymond Eliot, I had changed my mind. It may have been the tale of his ongoing relationship with his Hoover that made me see the light.

Anyway, he was telling me about “the bazoombas” on someone he had seen at the bus station that morning. That’s how he referred to women’s breasts. Bazoombas. Maybe he thought the term endearing. It wasn’t, but that’s when the truth dawned on me.

I had to break into Bomstad’s house.

I’m not sure what the exact connection between the two thoughts was, but suddenly, it was all very clear. Nancy Drew wouldn’t have sat around listening to some pervert talk about bazoombas while her life slid down the drain. She would have taken action, and her adventures always turned out swell. She was never raped or imprisoned, but then, as far as I knew, she was never accused of murder by a barbaric officer of the law, either. Still, like Nancy, I wasn’t the kind to let my life just slide along unheeded. Generally, I felt a stirring need to sabotage it by whatever means necessary.

So it was, on the following afternoon, that I badgered Solberg into getting Bomstad’s home address, got directions on MapQuest.com, and set off on my adventure.

I took the 405 south and exited onto Burbank Boulevard. Oakland Drive was lined with oleander and jacarandas. A hot September wind rustled their branches as I drove around the block, trying to act as if I owned a home in the area, though as things stood, I would have been lucky to afford a mailbox in that zip code. Even my dusty little Saturn seemed to feel outclassed. I gave it a cerebral pat on the dash and circled the block again, getting the lay of the land.

Bomstad’s house was surrounded by a Gothic-looking wrought-iron fence with pointed tips and double gates that arched across the smooth sweep of black tar driveway. Most of his actual domicile was hidden behind impressive-looking trees and the crest of a perfectly manicured lawn.

On the fifth circuit past his towering gates, I parked on Bellflower Street and gave in to thought. My current plan of action was crazy. Despite evidence to the contrary, I knew that. I wasn’t Nancy Drew, and going into the Bomb’s house uninvited might very well be misconstrued as breaking and entering by certain members of the law enforcement community. On the other hand, I had already been accused of far worse.

The sun was beginning to set over the Santa Monicas, but it was still hotter than hell in the valley of angels. I pulled a half-melted Snickers out of my purse and ruminated. And sure enough, once the undiluted sugar started amping up my system, I began to think more clearly.

Bomstad, I realized, was apt to have a first-flight security system, and there was little point in going through the trouble of scaling his carnivorous-looking fence if I was going to be hauled off in handcuffs before I reached his front door.

I finished off the candy, licked my fingers, and chewed on my lip. It wasn’t as inspiring as the infusion of sugar, but I knew what I had to do.

Turning the ignition, I shifted into gear and pulled up beside the cherry trees near Bomstad’s front gates. They loomed over me like a demon’s dark wings, but I forced myself out of my car. The parched wind snatched at my blouse, but I barely noticed the heat. I was sweating like a zealot from nerves already.

Nevertheless, I donned my most casual expression and sauntered up the sloping driveway, silently chanting my mantra: I am innocent. I am unafraid. I am innocent. I am cool.

And if anyone asked, I was with the Jehovah’s Witnesses. No one’s cooler than that.

I felt strangely disembodied as I approached the closed gates, but once there, I glanced surreptitiously up and down the street and squeezed my face up to the bars.

A little red light gazed back at me from a narrow black box behind the wrought iron.

The fence was armed and dangerous. I couldn’t get in without telling the world, or at least American Security, that I had breeched their defenses.

Something rustled behind me.

I spun toward the sound, certain Rivera had come to slap me in irons, but there was no one there. A cherry tree branch scraped against the Saturn’s fender. Who would have thought it would sound like the lieutenant?

Heart still pounding, I goose-stepped back to my car, propped myself behind the wheel, and power-locked the doors.

I wouldn’t be able to break into Bomstad’s house, after all, and as I turned the ignition and sped toward home, I realized I had never felt more relieved in my life.

D
uring the following week, I debated whether it was normal to doubt my clients’ every innocuous word. I was trying to put the horrors of the past behind me, but it wasn’t going well. And it wasn’t just Bomstad’s death that had put me on the skids. It was his lies. I couldn’t help but wonder if Mr. and Mrs. Peters, who seemed painfully sincere about reconciling, were boinking every Tom, Dick, and Judy who crossed their paths. I wondered if Frances Rockwell really washed her hands five times before every meal, and if Nita Baldwin, who was as thin as Barbie on speed, actually ate Twinkies between meals, as she claimed.

And when I wasn’t questioning such cosmos-shaking revelations, I wondered if I was a coward. I had never thought of myself in those terms. In fact, when graduating from Holy Angels some fifteen years before, I had been voted the girl most likely to spit in someone’s eye. My classmates hadn’t been very specific about whom that someone might be, or what they might do to deserve my ire, but I had still been impressed with the categories those little high-school geniuses came up with.

Now, however, I wondered if they had chosen the wrong girl. Maybe Evie Johnson deserved the title. Or even Katherine Townsend, since she had, on graduation day, convinced her second cousin to streak across the stage wearing nothing but a ski mask. A decade and a half later, I realized that if I had been allowed a ski mask in such a situation, I probably would have worn it on an entirely different body part. But there you go, different strokes.

Anyway, I didn’t like the idea that I might be less than courageous. It was demoralizing. And I didn’t appreciate the fact that I was now questioning every insignificant scrap of information my clients fed me. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t professional. It wasn’t propagating my sanity.

The days crept by with lingering problems and unanswered questions. By Friday I found myself cruising down Bellflower Drive again. Every yard was immaculate. Every shrub flowering. It looked like a fairyland.

I had always wanted to live in fairyland—someplace where even weeds dare not trespass, where the sun always shines, the grass is always green, and cellulite turns to muscle without lifting a finger.

There was only one problem. People like Andrew Bomstad tend to own fairyland, and though they could afford to poison the weeds and suck out the cellulite, it may very well be that both still existed.

I drove past Bomstad’s estate one more time, then trundled home to my dehydrated yard and ramshackle little house. It didn’t look half bad.

But by Sunday I felt certifiably insane. I had watered the thistle in my yard, washed every sock in the house, and thought about Bomstad until my brain was about to swell through my auditory canal.

I either had to take a look in Bomstad’s house or have myself committed. I closed my eyes as I gripped the phone and waited for Solberg to answer.

“Chrissy.” He sounded as happy as a songbird. I felt my shoulders droop.

“Hey, J.D.”

“Howdy do. Say, I still haven’t heard from your secretary yet.”

“She’s been pretty busy.” And I hadn’t told her anything about him. I knew it was wrong of me. But asking a friend to endure his company seemed significantly worse.

“I’m busy, too. Maybe we can get busy together,” he said and brayed like a tickled burro into the receiver.

I winced. “Listen, Solberg, I have another favor to ask.” Hell waits for no man.

The bray stopped in mid hee-haw. “No.”

“Come on.” I admit I hadn’t expected him to turn me down flat. After all, he was still Solberg, and last time I looked I still had boobs. It defied all sorts of logic. “This is simply an insignificant little nothing. I’m sure you could do it in your sleep.”

“You know what my IQ is?”

Now there was a question I hadn’t anticipated. “No. I don’t believe I have that information on file, J.D.”

“It’s off the charts.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I know what you’re trying to do.”

Stay out of jail?

“You’re trying to flatter me, get me to do some stinkin’ job.”

“I don’t know anyone else who can do it, Solberg.”

I admit that I may have let a little bit of a girly whine enter my voice. But what was a little whine in the face
of a life sentence?

“Yeah, well, the answer’s still no.”

I closed my eyes, said two Hail Marys, and jumped in. “That’s too bad. Elaine’s free next Saturday night.”

There was dead silence from the other end of the line. It was punctuated with debilitating guilt which oozed from me like noxious fumes.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“It’s not much.” My heart was pumping like a thigh master. “Really.”

“Is it illegal?”

“I’m a psychologist,” I said, trying to sound aghast. “Trained—”

“Is it?”

I drew a deep breath and closed my eyes. “Maybe a little bit. But just—”

“Forget it.”

He was right. Absolutely. I’d lost my mind. “You’re right,” I said. “It probably can’t even be done.”

The phone went quiet. “What can’t be done?”

“Don’t worry about it. I shouldn’t have asked.”

“That Eileen . . .” He paused, knowing he was wrong again and fighting his social ineptitude like a master swordsman. “Elise . . . E—”

“Elaine,” I corrected.

“Yeah. Is she really free Saturday night?”

“She was supposed to go to a movie with a friend, but he got the flu.”

“Yeah?”

I could hear him weakening. If I had a soul, I’m pretty sure it would have cranked up my conscience just about then. I did a quick, spiritual check. Nothing. “Listen, I’m sorry I bothered you,” I said and drew the receiver slowly away from my ear.

“Wait!”

I’m ashamed to say that I may have smiled. But just a little. “What’s that?” I asked.