Authors: George P Saunders
“No, thanks. I just need to finish up our little talk here, then
I’ll be on my way.”
Cyndi watched as Marshall headed toward the wet bar and reached for more
brandy. He poured. Long. Hard. And killed the drink in
a single shot.
Cyndi leaned in to Lou and whispered. “He’s been drinking. A
lot.”
“You don’t say.”
“I do.”
“The lush. I’ll tell mom next time I see her. He’ll get no
cookies on that day.”
Cyndi stared at him dead serious for a moment, then broke out into a
giggle. She put both hands on his chest. “Clown.”
“Yeah. That’s me.”
She nodded, taking the hint. She kissed him on the cheek.
“Have dinner with us on Sunday. Please?”
“I’m seeing Sonia.”
She smiled brightly. “Wonderful. Bring her, too.”
He sighed, suddenly feeling like he was about four thousand years old,
give or take a day. “Maybe next weekend, okay? I haven’t spent some
quiet time with her in awhile.”
“Okay. I won’t press.”
She turned and walked to Marshall. She took the brandy snifter,
helped herself to a chug, then handed it back to him. She kissed him
quickly on the lips. “Don’t stay up too late. And settle down on
this stuff, okay?”
“You bet,” Marshall slurred. He kissed her, and she moved back
toward the bedroom.
Lou watched her go. For a moment, there was silence between the
men. Marshall walked to the bar and poured himself another brandy.
Lou watched Marshall, who was beginning to weave, as he stood near the
counter.
“Cyndi looks good,” Lou said.
“Always does,” Marshall burped. “I tell you we’re going to Scotland
this winter?”
“Terrific. Lots of castles, I hear. And Scotsman.”
“Yeah.”
“I can’t afford a trip like that on a cop’s pay. Too stylish.
But send me a postcard.”
“I’ll bring you back some good single-malt. Fifty year shit, not a
fucking blended. There’s a big dif, you know.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Lou drank half his glass, growing more weary by the moment of this
intermission horseshit. Finally, Marshall sighed and cleared his throat.
“Linda brings in a lot of money for the firm,” Marshall said, a note of
resignation creeping into his voice. “You don’t just fire or say fuck you
to that kind of rainmaker, even if she is a gold-plated bitch. You deal
with her and try to overlook the more obnoxious idiosyncrasies of her
personality.”
“Which you seem to do almost too well,” Lou said.
Marshall pointed a finger at Diamond. “I hired you to find a
killer. Not offer value judgments.”
“You’re dicking with me, Marshall,” Lou shot back.
“Fuck you. I’m telling you the truth.”
Lou watched his brother, trying to find something to work with in terms
of negotiation. What was he hiding?
“I’m getting the impression that the truth is so buried under bullshit
that it would take a pile driver to get at it.”
“Book Simpson for murder,” Marshall said quietly.
“Fuck you. I’m investigating. And fuck you if you decide to
fire me. Burke is hospitalized. I’ve got the run of L.A.
homicide.”
Marshall took a breath and looked out the window. It had started to
rain, a light drizzle pattering against the pane. Somewhere over Topanga
Canyon, miles away, a streak of lightning crackled across the night sky.
“Thought we were on the same side, brother,” Marshall said.
Lou came up to him, forcing his brother to look at him in the eye.
“You forget what a cocksucker I can be. Especially when it comes to my
job. And I’m going to keep on digging. Because I’ll bet it goes
deeper than Linda Baylor. Or Don Simpson.”
Marshall’s eyes crinkled in understanding. “You’re expecting to
find me at the bottom of the shit heap, aren’t you?”
“I’ve learned to expect everything, everywhere. Any time, any
place. It goes with the job.”
Marshall waved him off and walked away from the window. He reached
for the brandy carafe on the wet bar counter. “Just wrap this crap up,
Lou. That’s why I hired you. Don’t drag it out.”
Lou finished the rest of his drink and put it down on the dining room
table.
He then walked to the front door. Just before he reached it, he
stopped.
“What happened to us, Marshall? When we were kids I was the vicious
prick of the family. You were always the good one. Defender of the
faith, Abel to my Cain. You used to care.”
Marshall poured more brandy into his glass—almost to the top.
“We’re not kids anymore, Lou.”
Lou thought about that for a moment. “We’re not even friends.
Not really brothers, either. And sometimes, it seems ... not even human.”
Lou opened the door and left.
Marshall looked at the empty brandy carafe, then reached for another
bottle and turned the cap.
TWENTY
He should have gone to a motel, someplace anonymous, seedy, hard to
find. The wisest course of action after the night and day he’d had
already. A quick drink, a long sleep, a better, wiser perspective coupled
with a cooler temperament for the next day.
Should have. His litany.
Instead, he found himself in front of Linda Baylor’s beach house thirty
minutes later. Fried, feeling elephant-fucked by the world at large ...
yet here nevertheless. And why? He tried to convince himself he was
just wrapping up an already shitty day of investigation by yet one more round of
questioning with Dame Baylor, Esq. The convincing died after one second
of honest, objective self evaluation. He wasn’t here to interrogate
anyone. He knew exactly why he was here.
Shit.
He stopped the car and made a quick call to Forensics to see if the boys
in the lab had discovered anything more about the bullets or the gun that were
found in Don Simpson’s house. After about three minutes, he was told they
had nothing.
“Same weapon, same bullets, Lou,” Marcos, the head lab technician,
muttered. “But what the fuck. That info is about as useful as a
feathered dildo in the fun-hole of Typhoid Mary.”
“That bad,” Lou chuckled.
“It was remote anyway, you know that.”
“Too well.”
“And the weapon itself is stripped of any kind of serial number.
I.e., untrackable. But who cares? You got the shooter, right?
Motive, no alibi, and, oh, yes—the same gun!”
“Let me know if you find anything else.”
“Secrets of World Peace? Mysteries of the Female Orgasm, maybe?”
“Yeah, stuff like that.”
“Sure. I’ll send a memo.”
“Later.”
Okay, so exactly what he expected. No help on the tech end, still
no witnesses …
…
but you have the main suspect, Lou
—
Don Simpson. Gun in
house, silencer, crazy fucked-out-of-his-mind shooting spree, a singing drunk,
a vengeful husband …
… so what was the mystery? As Marshall had pointed out:
Marianne Simpson (unfaithful wife), Jason Randall (jealous husband).
Gun. Blam, blam. Dead lawyers (the best kind!). Voilà.
Simple.
Lou sighed and stared at Linda Baylor’s house.
Not simple. It all schtunk, as his dad used to say when he was
three sheets to the wind on vodka and dying from lung cancer. Schtunk,
schtunk, schtunk.
Lou got out of the car and walked toward the front door.
He knocked twice and waited. No answer. For no reason at all,
he reached for the door knob and turned it. Not surprisingly, the door
was open. Inviting.
Open door. Simple.
Uh, huh.
He should leave now. A quick drink, a good sleep …
He walked into the dimly lit foyer (
into the Fifth Ring of Hell
,
he thought). Stop it, he chided himself. He was just here to—to—
“Linda?” he called out softly.
No answer. He continued to make his way into the living room.
Moonlight lit the room through the terrace door which was partly open.
Again, he thought, inviting. He passed through the terrace door and
looked down at the beach.
She emerged out of the waves like Venus being born from the sea. Of
course, she was completely naked (what else was new?!). She found his
eyes immediately and smiled as if she had been expecting him.
“What are you doing on my beach?” she called out, absent any sense of
astonishment at his presence here.
He walked down to the beach taking in her irresistible beauty.
“Surprising you,” he whispered huskily.
He took her in his arms and found her mouth. The kiss was anything
but gentle. It was ravenous, almost ferocious. It was met by an
indignant slap across the face. He considered the blow momentarily, then
kissed her again. She slapped him once more, but his response was yet
another kiss.
This time Linda Baylor returned the kiss in kind.
They fell to the surf oblivious to everything around them, including the
waves raging over their entwined bodies. Diamond tore his clothes off
with Linda’s assistance, and drove himself into her. She let out a small
scream. His own sounds matched hers as the growl of the ocean enveloped
them both.
Their passion didn’t end on the sand. For several more hours it
continued unabated. From the surf they stumbled to the bedroom in a
desperate, all consuming, maddening frenzy. Diamond, in and out of
reality, occasionally took a second to consider his actions. Brief
respites of clarity in a seemingly unending wave of ecstasy that was Linda
Baylor. It was wrong. He knew this in the deepest part of his heart.
It was a conflict of interest, an impediment to his investigation, a damning
breach in personal ethics and professionalism. Yet he couldn’t help
himself. And Linda Baylor wouldn’t help him, either.
Later, there was rest. Sporadic in its coming, so to speak, but on
these brief occasions, Diamond attempted conversation. It was generally
met with a more passionate, less verbose response from Linda. After yet
one more bout of frenzied sex, Linda rolled off of him and stared into his
eyes.
“Why did you come here tonight?” she said.
They were way past the bullshit at this point, and Diamond saw no reason
to be cagey. “For answers.”
Not strictly true, his unconscious would have objected. But in his
heart of moral heart, that’s why he had dropped by. Linda knew
better. “You’re lying.”
Diamond thought about that for a second. Then smiled. “So are
you. So is Marshall.”
It was Linda’s time to take a breath. “So. You still think I
may have killed Jason and Marianne.”
“Maybe,” Diamond sighed. “But I’ll take a guess at this point and
say no.”
“Okay, if not me, then how about Don Simpson?”
Diamond met her gaze frankly. Not out of the question, nothing was
at this stage of the game. “Maybe,” he said again. “But—”
“But, your guess is no. Did you talk to Robert August?”
The Robert August issue made him glance at his watch. He was
vaguely concerned about the passage of time—strike that, the amount of time he
had spent here tonight. He should have been at headquarters, reviewing
files, re-examining forensic evidence, planning meetings.
Instead, he was here screwing his brains out with his prime suspect in a
murder one case. Lovely.
“Tomorrow,” he muttered, then caught something in her eye that made him
curious. “Are you saying August killed those people?
Linda smiled enigmatically. “I’m not saying anything.”
Diamond felt a momentary surge of anger and he pulled her hair, a gesture
which could have been confused as passion, but which Linda understood to mean
(and Diamond clearly meant) as a warning.
“That’s the problem with this case. No one says much of
anything. It’s beginning to piss me off.”
Linda freed herself from his grasp, then snuggled herself against his
chest. They didn’t say anything for a long time after that. Diamond
was about to doze off, when Linda whispered. “How did she die?”
Diamond’s eyes opened slowly. “Who?”
“Your wife.”
Not a favorite subject, not one he really wanted to revisit. Not
here. Not this night.
“Didn’t Marshall mention that, too?”
Linda kissed him gently on the lips. A kiss more comforting than
passionate. A kiss that seemed to beg for him to trust her. Which,
for some strange reason, he wanted to do.
“Not really,” she said. “I only asked him once. Just as I’ll
only ask you this once. He told me never to ask him again. Are you
going to say the same thing?”
Diamond turned his head and stared out the bedroom window at the
moonlight just beyond.
His wife’s death was more like a dream now, a phantom incident that
seemed never to have occurred. He had rendered the circumstances of her
death to just that—a misty, shadowy thing, deliberately devoid of detail.
A ghost. Something that may or may not have ever been. Still, there
was memory. And even now, pain.
“It was five years ago,” he began, his voice surprisingly husky. He
couldn’t help but notice the choke in it. “Christmas Eve.”
Then, suddenly, he was back there. The night loomed large, real and
three dimensional, and there was no deficit of detail or remembrance. He
could even smell the cool air and the vague scent of stir fry from the King Fu
restaurant down the street as he held his wife’s dying body in his arms.
The evening had started out so well. They had made love,
celebrating his last case as a lawyer—one he had won. He had been hired
by the SRT and was looking forward to his new career. That night there
was success in his life and redemption for his young client, a 17 year old girl
accused of killing her 20 year old brother for attempted rape. The case
had been a complicated one. In fact, it had almost ended up in Superior
Court, instead of remanded to Juvy where it should have remained from the
beginning, had it not been for some aggressive posturing by the District
Attorney. When all was said and done, however, Lou Diamond had defended
Missy Jones from the powers that be, and had prevailed in her defense.
The press hailed him as a champion of juvenile females’ rights and everyone had
gone home happy. Except the prosecution who had pushed for, at minimum,
second degree manslaughter. Miss Jones had indeed killed her drunken
brother, LeRoy, as he had tried to assault and sexually molest her. But
it had indeed been an accident. During the struggle to free herself from
his grip, she had kicked him down two flights of stairs, where he landed and
broke his neck. The prosecution’s case contended that one single kick did
not send LeRoy into the next world. Instead, they insisted that it had
been several pre-meditated blows, designed to inflict maximum damage, that had
done the deed. And on and on. Bottom line, the prosecution’s case
was marginal, at best, even though Missy herself had been in and out of Juvy
(along with LeRoy) for the past several years. Diamond’s defense was
straight forward and simple, enough for any jury to understand with minimal
mental struggle: Missy’s brother was a drunken brute with one incident of
assault on his record already, and Missy had had no choice but to defend
herself from his crazed attack. Her outer clothes had been ripped, there
were bruises on her face and neck, and the torn panties pretty much told the
story of what had happened—or would conceivably
have
happened if Missy
hadn’t struggled free.