April Smith - Good Morning, Killer

Rick’s body flinched against the wall.

“He didn’t give you up, Ana.”

“He didn’t?”

“The tip came from a female employee of the Santa Monica Police Department.”

“What’s her name?”

Before Galloway could intervene, Rick said, “Margaret Forrester.”

I laughed. I just laughed.

“She have a hard-on for you?”

I shrugged. How do you describe someone who gets herself banned from a dry cleaner?

“She’s very pretty and very crazy.”

“That could work to your advantage.”

It was hard to listen. Hard to think.

“How is Andrew doing?”

“He’s awake and talking.”

“Really? That’s fantastic!”

“Well,” said Rick, scratching his cheek, “maybe.”

“Oh come on, you think he’s going to flip? Tell me you don’t believe in true love.”

Rick just chuckled. “My impression of him was that he had a major chip … But I can see what you saw in the guy.”

“Thank you.”

After a moment Galloway said, “There are always two sides, Ana. We want to hear yours.”

“With respect, I think I need an attorney.”

“Yes, you do.”

“What attorney,” I said, “would you recommend?”

“Devon County.”

County was a former cop turned lawyer who represented law enforcement personnel, all the big high-profile cases. Police corruption. Murder.

“You must think I’m in big trouble.”

They were waiting.

“I’ll give Mr. County a call.”

“We’ll do our best to cooperate with him.”

“Thank you.”

“And get you out of here ASAP.”

“Thank you.”

“Get you a doctor.”

“Great.”

Now Galloway paused. “You know you can’t come back to work until this is resolved?”

I nodded.

“We have to take your weapon and credentials.”

“I understand.”

Galloway drew the pad closer. “Are you ready to make your statement? Want to take a break?”

I hung my head.

“I just want to apologize for whatever disgrace I have caused the Bureau.”

Galloway smiled gently. “Don’t give away the store.”

Over here,” said Pickett, when they had left. We stood before an old wooden cabinet. He pulled a slip from a drawer.

“Special handling,” he told the custody assistant. “The lady is an FBI agent.”

Her eyebrows went up.

“Special handling,” I said. “Is that good, or bad?”

Pickett didn’t answer, concentrating on the form. The pen paused.

“Any ‘observable physical oddities’?”

“Me,” I asked, “or you?”

He snorted.

“Not usually this much fun around here, is it?” I quipped.

They took my fake lizard belt, scuba watch accurate to fifty feet, amethyst ring and gold loop earrings, the leather purse and contents, minus my credentials, which had been plucked out for Galloway and Rick. They might as well have removed my spleen. I signed for my possessions, then we moved to a computer/scanner to enter my fingerprints into the files of the Department of Justice, Sacramento and county.

“You guys are high-tech. All we get are ink pads.”

The custody assistant was spraying a screen in the control panel with window cleaner.

“She can roll a perfect set,” said Pickett.

The young woman smiled shyly. I was staring at the machine as if it were a huge hypodermic syringe. When I was a kid I once ran out of the doctor’s office before he could give me a tetanus shot.

“Ana.” Pickett shrugged with that big-eyed cop look I knew so well. “We got to do this.”

Afterward, we went back into the booking cell so I could call Devon County.

“Make as many calls as you want,” he said. “It only works collect.”

There was one battle-scarred phone with an unduly short cord, to prevent death by hanging.

They put me in a four-bunk cell. There were no other arrestees, but even if there had been, they would have kept me isolated. That’s what they meant by “special handling.” They did not mean the seatless stainless steel toilet or the mattresses made of fire-resistant polymer, or the ham and cheese sandwich and warm apple juice. Those were standard. Knowing the price of wounded pride, they had also put me on suicide watch.

I could not bear to touch the mattresses so I sat on the edge of a lower bunk. The ceiling was very far away. They put it high up to make you feel helpless and small. I thought of Juliana, holding on to the stuffed leopard.

I knew nothing. How long I would be here. If I would go to prison. If the famous attorney would get the message and be paged and take the case and show up. I didn’t even know the time.

I sat in the badness. There was no other place to go. I sat and rocked and whinnied and pleaded with God to make the terrible feelings go away, but they gripped me in the windpipe with caustic despair. There was nothing else. No voices to distract, just a deep infant panic for which I do not believe we have yet devised a comfort, one that could possibly equal that annihilation. I had no religious words so I stared at my socks.

I stared at my socks against the ugly turquoise floor and imagined, for diversion, the powers of the colposcope, that with my sight I could penetrate the creamy cotton weave, see through to the spaces. Suddenly I ached for Juliana and the closeness of our morning conversations. Why had I not reached out more? Called her, sometimes. Tried to help.

Juliana, of everyone, would know me, right now.

By ten in the morning the temperature in the Valley had risen to ninety degrees and swimming in Mike Donnato’s unheated pool was like swimming through razor blades — the dead cold chill of the water and the hot sun slashing.

I glided back and forth — four strokes, flip … four strokes, flip — across the tiny oval. This was what my world had shrunk to: fifteen feet of icy chlorination. In the current freak show that was my life, I had been turned into a seal, whooshing and snorting empty circles in a tank.

Believe me, I was grateful. Devon County had gotten the bail reduced, from half a mil to one hundred thousand dollars, after arguing successfully that I was not a flight risk, nor, since this had been a crime of passion, a danger to the community. As a condition of the bail agreement, I would be on home detention under the supervision and responsibility of the FBI. Good friend and former supervisor Mike Donnato had volunteered.

As shocking as the daily dive into the frigid water was the realization of how a legal maneuver had taken me through the mirror, made me prisoner, incomprehensibly, of Mike Donnato’s life, and the choices he had made, from marrying Rochelle to having three kids to buying this house way out in the Valley.

“Why don’t you take a nap?” Mike had suggested during the long rush-hour slog back from jail.

I lay on the half-lowered passenger seat, staring up at the beige interior, body tissue swaying subtly on the bones. That might have been the low point: humbled and inert, in Mike Donnato’s station wagon.

The trees had filled in since I’d been there last, the ocher two-story postmodern had already increased in value by a third. We pulled in at sunset, the twin round windows reflecting like rosy moons, the development bathed in uncertain light. I had been condemned, of all things, to suburbia.

He guided me like a regular guest, between the faux Greek revival columns that framed the doorway, to the floral-scented living room, and soon a glass of red wine, trusting me with a long-stemmed goblet. He dumped a pile of catalogues from the mailbox on the coffee table and went upstairs. Someone was home from school. Soon I heard a halting clarinet.

Devon County was a former LAPD detective who had become a federal prosecutor and then gone into private practice. Over the years there had been a small growth industry in our town of cops going to law school and then representing their own, mainly because the policeman’s union often paid for representation. Devon was smart and capable, and, most of all, he was not a press whore. What everyone at the Bureau respected was how he kept a low profile in a potentially tabloid case where a state senator had been shot and wounded by his male lover, a senior federal agent out of our Sacramento field office who nobody had known was gay. Although he could have made the national news every night, Devon County considered it in the client’s best interest to keep that story out of the papers.