Wendy Hornsby - Bad Intent

“Oh, yeah.” Oscar deepened the furrow between his eyebrows and thought it over. Seeming confused, he looked up at Mike. “Got another beer in that icebox, Mikey?”

“Sorry, Pop,” Mike said. “We’re all out.”

There were two six-packs behind the watermelon.

Mike seemed to be embarrassed by his father or something his father had said. That surprised me, because I thought I knew him better. With me, Mike had always been open about his hardscrabble upbringing, the scrapes his alcoholic parents got into, a few narrow misses with the law of his own. I wondered what nerve Oscar had touched.

All of us carry wounds from childhood that neither time nor accomplishment can heal. Now and then those old wounds get hit just right and they start to bleed, no matter how hard we try to keep them covered up. As I watched Oscar standing there, weaving a little in the middle of Mike’s shiny kitchen, I began to wonder if maybe he had brought with him the scary specter of the kid who used to bail his dad out of the drunk tank every Monday morning, the kid who signed his own report cards when he didn’t know where to find his mother.

I have made it a point to forget everything I learned in Dr. Hauser’s Modern European philosophy. But what came to mind out of somewhere was Nietzsche: “That which doesn’t kill us makes us stronger.” Fine. But we can be strong and still hurt like hell.

I picked cornsilk from my fingers and went over to my tall, white-haired Mike. He was lost in thought, reducing the fat tomato to runny pulp. I touched his hand above the knife and he looked over at me, expectant, waiting for a question.

I stretched up and whispered into his ear. “I love you, Mike.”

He smiled, oddly shy. I guessed because Oscar was there. Maybe not.

“How’d I get so lucky?” he said. He looked down at the pulverized tomatoes. “We’re making tacos, right?”

“Broiled chicken and salad.”

He laughed then, and started to say something I’m sure would have been pithy. But, like so many epiphanal moments in my life, the telephone interrupted. Mike wiped his hands and reached for it. “Flint,” he said into the receiver, and then, “No shit,” a couple of times. As he hung up, he was reaching for the small television that sits on the counter next to the sink.

“What is it?” I asked.

“That was Merritt. Says to turn on the news.”

The Parker Center demonstration was headline news-rocks and bottles thrown, a case of heat prostration-but “in-depth analysis” of the issue behind the fuss was promised after the weather report. We were waiting for the anchor to get to it when Casey and Michael burst in from the ice cream store, optimists in that miserable weather, carrying an insulated bag that was already leaking.

“Hi, Pop,” Michael said, clapping his grandfather on the shoulder in passing as he dashed to the freezer. “How’s it going?”

“Just fine, son. Just fine,” Oscar grinned. “Who’s your tall friend?”

It was Casey’s turn to blush.

“Oscar,” I said, “this is my daughter, Casey.”

Oscar made a show of looking all the way from her toes to the top of her head. “Your daddy play basketball?”

“No,” Casey sighed. “He’s a litigator. And the weather up here is hot.”

Borderline smart-alecky, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

On the screen, the weatherman predicted hundred-degree weather through the week.

“Come on, Casey,” Michael said, taking her elbow and leading her toward the living room. “Let’s dub those CD’s. If you’re going to ride the bus, you’ll need lots of tapes for your Walkman.”

“Pretty cute couple,” Oscar said when the kids were gone.

Mike said, “Ssh,” and leaned toward the television.

A background roll showed the front of the county Criminal Courts building downtown L.A. Howard Mansell, a veteran local-news reporter, read from notes ruffled by the hot wind. “In an extraordinary, perhaps unprecedented move, the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office has joined with defense attorneys representing a convicted murderer in asking the Superior Court not only to free a man the D.A. worked to convict a number of years ago, but also in asking the judge to wipe his conviction from the records.

“Fourteen years ago, Charles Pinkerton Conklin was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison for shooting a police officer inside a Southeast Los Angeles service station restroom. The preponderance of evidence was supplied by two juvenile eyewitnesses who testified they saw Conklin at the murder scene. In affidavits presented to the district attorney by Reverend Leroy Burgess, those eyewitnesses now say that undue and unrelenting pressure from the investigating detectives frightened them sufficiently to cause them to lie when they identified Charles Conklin.

“The district attorney stopped short of pronouncing Conklin innocent of the crime, saying instead that the actions of the police so tainted the trial that the verdict must be set aside. A hearing has been set for Monday, one week from today.

“The police department’s only comment has been to say that they are conducting their own inquiries.”

I turned to Mike, furious. “You lied to me.”

“I did not.” Mike was watching Oscar get his own beer from the refrigerator, apparently more worried about another beer than about defending himself. “It’s political bullshit. Cops make good targets.”

“I know who Conklin is,” I said. “Mike, you set me up with Etta.”

“Yeah. So?”

“You just plain set me up.”

“It isn’t that way.”

On screen, Mansell went to comments from friends and family of the imprisoned man. Mike reached to turn off the television, but I stopped him when I saw a too-familiar face filling the screen. I yanked up the volume, the better to hear my own fifteen-hundred-dollar piece of tape roll. The copy wasn’t very good, washed Etta’s mocha makeup with a reddish cast. But then, Ralph had run copies in a hurry, probably on the cheap.

Mike watched Etta on the screen, horrified.

“You ax me,” Etta was saying, looking into the lens I had held that morning, “I say it’s the lying police should hang they heads for takin’ away the baby daddy, puttin’ him in that jail for his child’s whole damn life. What’s he suppose’ to do?… Fourteen years for somethin’ he ain’t even done. You lock up an innocent man that way, who’s gonna see to it his boy come up right?”

Let me just clear up one misconception here, I’m not a priest or an ordained minister of any kind. I never said I was. Sure, I wear a clerical collar. That collar opens a lot of doors for me that wouldn’t normally open for a private detective.

I’m not a flimflam man. Leroy Burgess is not getting rich off the misfortunes of others. My organization, Pastoral Crusade, is completely nonprofit.

The show was taped, but my rage was live. Leroy Burgess, the man in the backward collar I had seen at the demonstration. A beefy, balding, dock-worker type, he had created the issue that was eating a hole through my midsection, had put in motion forces that were beginning to make me think I was a jerk for persuading myself I could find domestic bliss with a maverick like Mike Flint. I had never met Leroy Burgess, but I was nursing an unhealthy hatred for the man.

Leroy Burgess sat in the middle of a too-blue Satellite Network News set surrounded by district attorney Baron Marovich, my old pal Ralph Faust, and a gorgeous, pin-stripe suited young woman I had never seen before. I thought it looked like an unholy sort of alliance, and leaned forward from my seat in the middle of the bed to hear every word without turning up the volume.