Authors: Daphna Edwards Ziman
Bread and circus
, thought Jake.
He lost himself for a moment in a blues riff, sliding up and around some sweet sorrow, then swooshing through a little gully of misery. The loss of his best friend had penetrated further and further into his gut. For reasons he couldn’t explain, he was protecting his best friend’s mistress, Kelly Jensen, aka Natalie St. Clair, by freelancing this investigation instead of turning over everything he’d found out about her to the FBI.
On the flight back from Houston after visiting Cheryl Gordon, he had done a Google search on Michael Young. There were many matches from all over the country, of course, but he shortened the list to those in the Houston area. He was waiting for an expanded search from his investigators. He had a feeling … Surely finding Michael Young, the mysterious uncle, would be crucial in learning the truth about Kelly Jensen.
The networks flickered to commercial, and Jake’s eyes drifted over to Fox News. A token liberal was trying to make her point in the milliseconds in which her flaccid interlocutor paused for breath.
C-SPAN was showing empty Senate chambers to which Senator Mary Landrieu was passionately describing the need to address the epidemic of autism by removing the mercury, Thimerosal, from the MMR and other vaccines; veterans, the elderly, and children, she explained, were falling prey to the needs and desires of the pharmaceutical industry. MSNBC was running a financial segment. It was more corporate corruption than even Jake could handle. The world was falling apart while corporations were continuing to manipulate the system in endless new underhanded ways.
Jake meandered along a new melody, his sax bleating out a questioning tone. What about Suzanne Garrett? She had always seemed so aloof from Porter’s political life and aspirations. Jake would never have guessed she had an interest in—much less designs on—his job. Could someone else be pulling her strings? She had a lot of acquaintances who could benefit greatly by having a senator for a friend.
Out of the corner of his eye, Jake saw a light flashing on his office phone. He stopped blowing, mid-riff, and picked up the receiver.
“Yeah?”
His assistant, Joyce Bloom, said in her Brooklyn accent, “Alana Sutter for you.”
Jake waited. The phone clicked.
“Jake?”
“Alana. What’ve you got?”
“I thought you’d be interested in this. You know how the FBI was looking into three-strikes wackos?”
Jake murmured assent, fiddling with the keys on his sax.
“They’ve actually found someone, based on the DNA in the hair in Porter’s fist. There’s an interesting twist, though.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a woman.”
Jake’s breath caught, and he laid the sax on his desk.
Kelly.
“They think a woman killed Porter?”
“She hasn’t covered her tracks well. Her record is a mile long. Foster child in the Houston area.” Cheryl Gordon, with her barely hidden bruises, flashed across Jake’s mind.
“Joined the Marines after emancipation.”
The Marines?
“Drifted around after being honorably discharged. Settled in Nevada for a while. Did a little time for her first two felonies: stole a car in Laughlin, and a couple years later tried to rob a bank outside Reno. Disappeared around a year ago.” Jake thought of Kelly in her Marilyn Monroe getup. It occurred to him that she could disappear into any persona she wanted to.
“What’s her name?” He braced himself, both dreading and longing to hear the answer.
“Stacy Steingart.”
Jake jerked. “Say that again?”
“Stacy Steingart.”
Natalie St. Clair. Kelly Jensen. Now Stacy Steingart.
“The FBI are working every lead they can and are closing in. They’re starting to act like they can smell this one.”
“Thanks for the update,” said Jake.
“I’ll let you know when I have more.”
Jake hung up the phone and turned to the windows. The blinds were only partially open, and the Hollywood Hills looked hot and dry, uninviting. Every year he forgot about October’s heat. Fire season, the Santa Ana wind season. He put his sax to his lips and blew long and loud. He had assigned several of his own private investigators on this case and had feelers out to other police departments. He pictured Kelly the night he’d seen her perform at Shrake’s and tried to imagine her in the military. It was hard, but not impossible. The images were different, but Kelly did emit a strength that could have come from surviving boot camp after a miserable childhood with the Gordons.
Jake became aware of a movement to his right and turned. Joyce held up two Evian bottles with one hand. With the other she removed an earplug from each ear.
“Your next meeting,” she shouted. “They’ve been waiting a half hour.”
Jake turned and saw two forgettable men wearing gray Armani suits, both squeezing into the small space on his couch. Joyce handed them each a bottle of water and looked at Jake with a
Well?
expression on her face. An East Coast transplant, she moved faster, talked faster, thought faster, and acted faster than anyone in Los Angeles. Jake often said she was his right arm, and she shared her boss’s ease with difficult situations and his intolerance of fools—even when the fool, on occasion, was her boss.
Jake turned back to the TV screens and blew a few more bars. This wasn’t good. For the first time in his career, he did not feel the tick of excitement about meeting a new client … hearing his or her story … assessing past, personality, and penchants while the person spoke. Jake just wanted to stare at the televisions, numb his brain, and blow on his sax. He blew a chromatic scale, ending on E-flat, which he put out in several long, low blasts that sounded like a dying rhinoceros. Then he laid the instrument on his desk and turned to his clients.
When they’d gone thirty minutes later, Jake stuck his head out to Joyce’s office and said something he’d never said in his life.
“Cancel the rest of my appointments. I’m going home.”
HOLLYWOOD BOULEVARD WAS ALIVE WITH FREAKS. Here, the drug addicts and prostitutes so pluckily portrayed in movies were flesh and blood, servicing their clients with real risks. Even from the balcony of her tenth-floor room at the Roosevelt, Kelly could clearly hear the cacophonous symphony below: Trucks roared and clanked and hissed. Bottles rolled and shattered in the alley. Two drunks yelled at each other, then shuffled off to find abandoned couches to pass out on. Cars accelerated in an incessant roar-hush.
Kelly went back through the glass door, picked up the Chanel bag off the desk, and pulled out the wallet. The driver’s license identified her mark as Joan Rice Davis. She was fifty-eight. Not an organ donor. Kelly placed the plastic card on the desk and investigated the rest of the wallet. Credit cards, stamps, $116 in cash. The contents of the purse were unremarkable too: bales of Kleenex in various stages of use, Chanel face powder, some coins, a gold-plated pen, a Filofax, half a roll of Certs, and an unused condom. Kelly put everything
except the license back in the purse and placed it on the floor, smiling to herself at the evidence of extramarital activities. Joan Davis was an ordinary upper-middle-class woman with common interests to match a common name. An easy identity to steal.
On a white notepad she began gently making strokes with a ballpoint pen, practicing loops and curves, circles and dots. Over and over she wrote Joan Davis’s signature—quickly, then slowly; methodically, then rushed. She lost herself in the work until the signature was identical to the one on the ID. Kelly put down the pen and stretched her arms over her head.
It was almost nine o’clock—closing time at the department stores. Kelly dialed Neiman Marcus and asked for the Lost and Found.
“Chanel bag? No. Nothing like that here,” reported the clerk. “There’s a Prada bag, though.” Kelly thanked the man and hung up.
“Mrs. Davis, you are one little piggy,” she mumbled. She had chosen exactly the type of woman she needed: wealthy yet still greedy, someone to whom $500 in cash still meant something.
Kelly leaned her neck to each side, stretching it gently, then picked up a magnifying glass. She studied the driver’s license, scrutinizing Joan Davis’s photograph. Using an eyebrow pencil, she drew feature lines on her own face. Next came her eyes. She shadowed the lids until they were sunken, and grayed in a scoop under each eye. Yellow contact lenses turned her green eyes amber. She widened her nose with flesh-colored putty and erased the line with foundation shading and several delicate swipes of a cosmetic sponge. She selected a blonde wig from her bag and, holding it in one hand, combed it until it was a cloud-like swirl. She sprayed it with hairspray, then pulled it over her hair. The metamorphosis was incredible. She was Joan Davis—almost. Kelly squinted into a magnifying mirror. The
chin and cheekbones were all wrong. She would have to pay extra attention to those areas tomorrow.
She pulled the wig off and wiped her face. It was past midnight. Keyed up, she drank a glass of water and opened her own wallet. Behind plastic was a picture of Kevin and Libby, taken at a portrait studio. Kevin had been grumpy that day, so his smile was forced. Libby’s face was glowing with toddler glee. Kelly kissed her finger and pressed it to each child’s face.
Then, with precise movements, she flicked on CNN and pulled her makeup kit to her lap. From the bottom compartment she lifted a small metallic and plastic device, like the machines stores used to use to manually imprint credit cards. It was a check maker, used by banks to authenticate and route checks. Kelly pulled the stolen Bensenhill Rolls-Royce checks from her suitcase, tore one off, and placed it on the desk. She made the check out to Joan Davis in the amount of $9,989.72 and ran it through the machine, which imprinted the sum and dented the paper to make it unique as a payroll check. She slid the check in an envelope, dropped it into the Chanel bag, and repeated the process twelve times.
She looked up as CNN switched to coverage of Porter’s murder. An ugly FBI man in a mustard yellow shirt was talking yet saying nothing, with the excuse that he couldn’t comment on an “ongoing investigation.” Kelly flicked off the TV, disgusted by the lack of information on the news. She set an alarm she knew she wouldn’t need and forced herself to go to bed.
But all she saw when she closed her eyes was the image of Jake Brooks talking with Suzanne Garrett at the funeral, and the flickering eyes of the FBI agents all around. She tried to replace them with an image of Porter, but nothing came, not even the outline of his nose or the shape of his eyes.
“Go away,” she whispered.
At last she fell asleep, but Jake Brooks came to her again, this time with a smile, gentle and warm. He reached for her, wrapped her in his arms, and grumbled, “Why did you do it?”
Kelly’s eyes flew open. She stared at the ceiling and waited again for sleep.
* * *
The next morning Kelly woke before sunrise to reapply Mrs. Davis to her face and body. Giddy with anticipation, she tried to calm her mind. She turned on CNN and applied another layer of her disguise while waiting through a commercial. When the news came back on, she forced herself to watch. A special logo twirled and wrapped itself around a picture of Porter.
MURDER OF AN IDEALIST
, read the caption. Solemn synthesizer music played, heavy on the horns. The graphic dissolved to an anchorwoman with black hair. She said a few words, then threw it to a reporter standing in front of the Venetian in Las Vegas.
“Investigators are still baffled by this case and say they haven’t ruled out terrorism.” The reporter talked a little more and then, suddenly, Jake Brooks was on the screen.
“We’re working with the FBI, the ATF, and local law enforcement officials,” he said levelly, “to see that whoever committed this heinous crime is … that he
or she
is brought to justice.” Brooks’s gray eyes drilled into the camera.
Kelly sucked in her breath.
He or she?
What did Jake Brooks know?
The broadcast moved on to a financial report, the producers already bored by the slow-to-arrive results in the murder investigation. Kelly snapped off the TV and stood in front of the black screen
for a few seconds, her body motionless. Then, with swift, sure movements, she finished her disguise. She angled her face in the mirror. It was a good job. She was unrecognizable as herself. Hurriedly, she pulled on her body padding, pantyhose, skirt, and jacket. The last step was the wig. She smoothed it over her head and used her fingers and a comb to get the curls tousled just right.
She checked her watch. Six forty-six. Then she piled the makeup back into the kit, packed everything in her suitcase, slung her purse over her shoulder, and headed for the door. With her hand on the doorknob, she remembered something. She pulled $100 out of her wallet and left the money on the bedside table for the maid. Then, checking the peephole first, she stepped out the door.
By seven fifteen she was merging the Corolla into the river of cars flowing on the 405 freeway, over the Sepulveda Pass. It was a good time to be maneuvering around Los Angeles, and the cars raced over the hill. Kelly tapped the
SCAN
button on the radio with a long, pearl-pink fingernail at the end of a hand on which she had painted a few age freckles. Several traffic reports buzzed by in succession. Then a man’s deep voice emerged from the chatter.
“When children don’t have the chance to bond, when they’re bounced from foster home to foster home, they are sure to become sociopaths. It’s a fact, people. Seventy-eight-point-eight percent of all U.S. inmates in penitentiaries come from the child welfare system …” Kelly reached up to stop the scan, but the voice had already morphed into a bouncy mariachi number.
When she had been with the Gordons, the arrival of the Child Protective Services representative was a monthly ritual. A few days afterwards, there’d be a “drive-by” visit by a social worker. Most of the time the woman would pull into the driveway, walk up to the porch, smile at Kelly, chat with the foster parents, and wave goodbye. During those few days, Kelly was spared from the beatings. The
Gordons told her to make faces at the social worker so she would be classified as “unmanageable” and get the foster family a larger check. Kelly once heard them claim she should be moved up to level 8. When she later saw they were receiving $8,000 a month for her, she knew the change had been made.