Wendy Hornsby - Bad Intent

I dropped my film at an all-night, one-hour developer a block from my office, and tipped the clerk twenty bucks to deliver the prints to me on her break.

There were a lot of cars in the office lot and people walking around outside my building. Lighting was good. But I parked in the fire zone next to the front door and asked the security guard to escort me down the long hall to my office, to come inside with me and look around. When I was satisfied that everything was as it should be, I thanked him, bolted the door behind him, and set to work.

Guido gave me some advice by phone before he hung up in frustration and drove over. Mike arrived at about the same time, with both of the kids. I put them all to work and rewarded their diligence with not-very-burned microwave popcorn and canned soda.

It was fun. Everyone had a task. Michael and Casey began repacking the tapes Casey had just finished filing, getting ready for the movers again. Mike and Guido bent together over a computer image manipulator. The only difficulty we encountered was agreeing on the music to play on the radio: Michael wanted headbanger, Casey preferred the Russian classics that sent Mischa into raptures, Mike held out for country, and Guido wanted, as always, jazz. We compromised on reggae.

My assigned area was Jennifer. Guido had brought along a fun new piece of equipment that made prints from videotape. I ran through miles of fire videos that Jack had given me, isolated a shot of Ralph Faust: Ralph looking like Prince Charming weeping over Cinderella’s tiny slipper-a size six, navy blue pump on his palm.

I made a series, zooming in closer with each print, Ralph holding the shoe with the fire as background, his hand with the shoe, the shoe alone, the scuffed heel only.

I was still playing with variations when the pictures I had taken in San Pedro were delivered. I sorted through them, picked four, put them on the stack accumulating on the table beside me. Onto the stack I added the pictures I had taken outside Kelsey’s trailer, Jennifer stopping to dump gravel out of her shoe. I played with the sequence, then I laid them all in a line on the floor. At the end of the line, I arranged the stolen shoes to match the angle of the first shot.

“Mike?” I said. “Where is that shoe I gave you at the fire?”

“Evidence locker somewhere. Why?”

“Can I have it?”

“Not a chance.” He came to peer over my shoulder. “Jesus. Good match. Where’d you go shopping?”

“Jennifer’s closet.”

Mike’s face turned a dangerous red. “Just don’t tell me about it.”

“Not much to tell.”

I asked Guido to make a tape of the prints. When he finished, I changed the angle of the shoes a few times, having him tape each alteration.

You walk a mile in your shoes and they begin molding to your feet, show where the toes and bunions are, bend over your instep in a particular way. The shoe on Ralph’s hand, the shoe on Jennifer’s foot, the shoes on my crappy office carpet all had the same characteristic big toe bump. Like a fingerprint.

I was editing the tape, fiddling with the sequence and form, when Mike summoned me. He had commandeered a tape player.

“See this?” Like a proud new father, he started the tape. He had taken the shot of Jennifer’s coat sleeves hanging in her closet, superimposed it over her shoe rack, manipulated the scale using the computer, so that the black sleeves lined up with the black shoes, the gray sleeves with the gray shoes, the navy blue sleeves with empty space. Over the space, he had laid the image of the battered navy blue pump in Ralph’s hand.

“I’m impressed,” I said.

He shrugged. “I do this shit all the time. It’s the way you put together any case. Except, I hang tight until I get a warrant so I can actually use what I find. Question is, what are you going to do with this foot thing when you’re finished?”

“I’m going to blackmail Jennifer.”

“Yeah, sure,” he said. But from his tone I knew he wasn’t at all sure I was kidding.

“I didn’t have a warrant for this, either.” I tossed him the tape I had made of my Biltmore conversation with Marovich. “Marovich spilling his guts. Can’t use it in court, but it’s interesting. He mentions you, big guy.”

“Jeez,” Mike muttered, but he slipped the little tape into his shirt pocket.

“I have a legal question for you,” I said.

“A little late for that, isn’t it?”

“Say you’re a lawyer, defending a client.”

“Never happen,” he said, a reflex.

I punched his arm, almost gently. “Say you’re a lawyer defending a client for crimes in which you participated.”

The know-it-all sneered. “Jennifer was in grade school when Wyatt Johnson got shot.”

“Wrong crime. Baron Marovich has retained Jennifer to defend him. He’s facing a campaign fraud charge, according to the docs on Jennifer’s desk. He has an appointment tomorrow with the U.S. attorney to discuss Roddy’s crimes, and Jennifer is going with him.”

“No shit?” Taken by surprise. I love it when I can drop one on him. “Really?”

“Really.”

“Well, Baron will get one tight defense,” Mike said. “If he goes down, he’ll sure as hell take her with him.”

“Poor Jennifer,” I said. I handed him the print-out I had made at her house. “But we can bring her down without Baron. She’s the lynchpin in all of this, the connection between Conklin and the D.A. and the preacher and the campaign. It’s all one. I don’t know whether Jennifer actually lit any fires, but she was there with the marshmallows when it happened.”

Mike turned off the player. “What are you going to do with this shoe bomb?”

“Copy to Jennifer, copy to Hector, one for the Bar Association, put it in the Big Film. Guido and I have a beautiful one-hour package almost ready for Lana, lays out the chain of conspiracy from the shooting of Wyatt up to this afternoon. We still need to work on the hearing this afternoon and the resignation of Baron, but we’re close. The network’s legal people are going to have fits, but I think we’re okay until we get to Jennifer at the fire’s point of origin.”

The cop came back to me, deep furrows between his white brows. “What are you going to say about Jennifer and the fire?”

I glanced at Guido before I answered, because we had argued this one out. “We’ll run the lab reports on the shoe found at the scene, highlight where they say traces of gasoline and paraffin were present. If we were doing a dramatization, I would have an actress run across the gravel lot, take off her shoes because they got full of rocks, slowed her down. And she was in a hurry. When that fire started, to quote the expert, ‘Kaboom.’ She’s lucky all she lost was a shoe.”

“That’s all wild supposition,” he said.

“I don’t think so. When she ran away from Kelsey’s, she just kept right on running. Like a jackrabbit, found some cover. She had the weekend to think things through, to talk with the other players. By Sunday night, she was still shaken, but resolved to gut it out to the end. To shut me up.”

The telephone rang. Guido answered, said, “She is,” and handed the receiver to me. But I heard only a dead line.

“Who was it?” I asked.

“Man.” He shrugged a shoulder. “Asked for you.”

“How did he sound?”

“Nervous, maybe. How much can you get from, ‘Is Maggie there?’”

We all went back to work. The call, or Mike’s reaction to it, unsettled me. Mike didn’t say anything, but he pulled out his shirttail and tucked it back in behind the automatic holstered at his side. After a while, maybe half an hour, Casey, stretching her back, asked, “Can I take Michael up and show him around the studio?”