Megan Abbott - Phoenix Noir

I ran back to the dining room and was just about finished putting things back in place when the voice came through my radio again: “ Boghossian, she’s at the corner. ”

I barked into the mouthpiece, “Ram her!”

I was making one last check, comparing where everything was with the Polaroids, when I heard the collision outside. It was about fifty yards from the house, some undercover cop plowing into Rhonda’s back end at the stop sign. I opened the bathroom door and told the dog to stay, then headed toward the patio, fit the doggy door insert into place, and reached through to slip the dowel back onto the runner.

Beyond the glass of the sliding door, I saw the large white dog slink into view. Our eyes met. He flinched a little, tail lodged between his legs. Ashamed, like everybody else.

It was up to the boys in the wire room now. I checked in as often as I could, but the days went by, nothing. Mike knew we’d been in there — tipped off by Cavanaugh, I supposed, something I had to keep to myself. Besides which, just like I’d thought, Mike and Rhonda were in a tiff, the two of them seldom speaking.

As time passed, though, I felt strangely encouraged. I knew the dynamics of the simmering fight. I heard the cues — the caustic one-liners, the icy silences. Somehow, some night, something would set them off. And the words would come boiling out, things they’d regret forever.

As it turned out, that night came right before Thanksgiving. And the somehow and something of it proved, to my way of thinking anyway, too apropos.

The surveillance team trailed Mike to a porno arcade near the airport. We’d watched him visit smut shops and strip clubs all over the valley, not sure if he was casing the places or had just grown tired of not getting any at home. This time, though, according to the cop watching from the parking lot, Mike came out wobbly.

“ I may be wrong, ” the radio voice reported, “ but I think our boy just had himself a little love. ”

When Mike got home he wasn’t inside five minutes before he launched into Rhonda — a fight over nothing, but so blistering that everybody in the wire room shuddered. When one of the cops reached out to turn off the recorder, though, honoring the minimization guidelines, I told him, “Wait.” We’d gotten our first lead in this case after a brawl between these two. I could justify listening on the grounds there was a reasonable expectation that, in their fury, one of them would say something useful. Accusing.

The voices kept rising, more and more shrill and cruel. And sexual. One Mormon on the wire crew blushed, but everybody kept listening, each of us wondering what we should do if, at some point, one of them tried to kill the other. And yes, finally, we heard scuffling. I reached for the phone to dial dispatch as I heard Rhonda stammer oddly, “ M-Mike, n-no. No! ” The yelling turned to muffled cries, then rhythmic, whimpering moans. Gradually it dawned on us that Mike had decided on a little show’n’tell, to demonstrate for Rhonda what had happened earlier that night, during his encounter at the porn hole.

“One good pipe-cleaning deserves another,” somebody cracked.

“Turn off the machine,” I said, knowing we’d get nothing of any use now. Adding insult to injury, Mike moved back into the bedroom that night. So that’s how you make your marriage work, I thought, hating him even more.

The first thirty days played out, no results. We got an extension but none of the departments would pony up the manpower like before. They put rookies on the line-of-sight details. Once, after letting a tail car pass him, Mike chased the cop all the way down Central Avenue, flashing his brights, just to embarrass the kid.

Meanwhile, the wire crew was going batty listening to nothing and more of nothing. We were back where we’d started — we’d never catch Mike Gallardi except red-handed, coming out the back of a restaurant. And everything we knew about him said that if that happened, he’d make us kill him.

“The man’s gonna be dead by Christmas,” someone quipped, and it became the unofficial slogan of the whole operation, until I told everybody to knock it off. “If you’re right, and we take him out, you don’t want to have to explain that little mantra to Internal Affairs.”

Given where we stood, though, I decided it was time to tickle the wire. I went to Tally again, told him we needed to put some pressure on the couple, inflict a little fear.

I showed up at Rhonda’s front door when surveillance con-firmed Mike was at the restaurant alone. I came in a marked unit, the strobe spinning out at the curb, and the uniform who’d driven stood with me on the porch. No more avoiding the neighbors — we wanted their attention now. Inside, the dog went off when the doorbell rang, then went still, dropping his tail, when he saw me beyond the grating.

Rhonda deadpanned, “Gee, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you and the dog knew each other.”

I pulled the subpoena from my jacket pocket and gestured for her to open the security gate. “Rhonda Gallardi, you’re to appear before the grand jury on December 5th. You’re not to discuss your scheduled appearance or the subject matter of your testimony with anyone except your lawyer — not even your husband. Understood?”

She looked taken aback but hardly stunned — some fright in her eyes, but a baiting grin too. I wondered if that was how she looked right before Mike hit her.

“What if I don’t open the door?”

“I’ll just set it down on the porch here. Either way, you’re served.”

The grin faded a bit, her fear quickening into anger as her eyes checked the cop behind me, then slid back. “This is harassment.”

“Guess how many times a day I hear that.”

“Because you’re a prick?”

I nodded for the cop to head back to the car. Once he was out of earshot, I said, “Know what I think? You’ve been trying hard for a long time to make things work — your restaurant, your marriage. I admire that. But the point where things were gonna change is gone for good.” I stuck my hands in my pockets, to look harmless. “You want to turn that around, now’s the time.”

Women who’ve been hit more than once have a look — sad and yet defiant, almost mocking, but defeated all the same. Come on, I thought, invite me in, talk to me. I knew, given the chance, I could open her up, end this thing. But her eyes turned hard and far away again. “Leave your papers on the porch,” she said, then shut the door.

In the wire room, we listened when Mike came home that night. Apparently, what I’d said registered, at least a little, because the good wife unloaded.

“No more! I’m done.”

“Shut up, Rhonda.”

“I’m not gonna lie under oath for you! I never wanted—”

“I said shut the fuck up, Rhonda!”

The sound of scuffling came again. I grabbed the phone to dial dispatch. But a minute later, they were outside the house, walking the dog. The perfect couple — Mike with his arm around Rhonda’s shoulder, holding her close, loving, protective, whispering into her hair.

Rhonda got coached well for her grand jury appearance. All her answers reduced to: I don’t remember. I’m not sure. I don’t think so. I don’t know.

“He beat us,” I told my guys afterward, like I was confessing to some crime of my own.

A week later we went in to pull the wires, and I was hardly shocked to see they’d put a three-piece console in front of the wall socket where we’d planted the living room transmitter. They’d been a step ahead of us the whole time. Took us an hour, though, to take the knickknacks down, drag the big thing away, claim our bug, then push the monster back and make sure all the junk was in the right place again, even smoothing the carpet so you couldn’t tell anything had moved.