Convicted (8 page)

“Another thing that happened a lot,” Sarah put in.

“He said I could never live with her. He said I couldn't play baseball anymore, or go over to Gabe's house, or talk to Jordan. I figured it was just talk, but then he wrecked my picture.”

Frank crouched down so that he was eye-level with the boy. “Your father hit you on the face with the picture of you and your aunt, didn't he Lex? That's how you got the cuts?”

Lex nodded. “It—it made me really mad. I had been mad before, but this time, I don't know, I just couldn't take it. I told him I was going to tell on him. I told him I was going to tell Jordan, because Jordan said that if he ever hurt me again, he was going to kick my dad's ass. And he would have, too!”

Jordan looked up at him. “Lexie—don't say anything more.”

Lex shook his head. “I don't care if they put me in jail.”

“No one's going to put you in jail,” Sarah said, but she looked uncertainly at Frank.

“He said he'd teach Jordan not to put ideas in my head,” Lex went on. “He said he was going to kill him. I tried to grab on to him, to stop him. I said, ‘Pick on someone your own size!' He pushed me down, and I hit my head. But I fell down near my baseball bat. He was laughing, and making fun of me. You know, saying ‘Pick on someone your own size!' over and over. So I picked up the baseball bat and I got up on top of the chair, because then I was his own size, and I told him to stop. He thought that was real funny. He said, ‘Soon as I take care of your friend, I'm going to make you stand on that chair while I whip you.' He turned around and was starting to reach for that shotgun, and so—so I swung the bat and hit him. Hard.”

Tears started rolling down his face, and he brushed them away. “He didn't move. I hated him. But I didn't mean to kill him. I just didn't want him to hurt Jordan.”

“And Jordan came over and tried to help you?”

“He tried to make it look like he did it—with the poker. He hid the bat, because it had my fingerprints on it. Jordan always tries to help me. No matter what I do wrong, he's good to me. When nobody else liked me, Jordan was my friend. He liked me even before Gabe. He stuck up for me. He taught me baseball.” He moved over to Jordan and said, “That came in handy, don't you think?”

Jordan put an arm around his shoulders. “Lex, you say the damnedest things.”

Lex hugged him tightly.

THE LONG EVENING GREW LONGER,
but by the end of it, Lex was released into Sarah Crane's custody, and Jordan went home with Ralph Kendall. After many discussions with attorneys and district attorneys, no charges were brought against anyone involved in the case. Sarah had already started taking Lex to see a counselor—more, she said, to help Lex get over eight years of hell than one night of finally escaping it. Neighbors, teachers, and friends wrote letters to the district attorney on both Lex's and Jordan's behalf.

“LOOK OUT, JORDAN!” LEX SHOUTED,
but his warning came too late—as Frank watched, Bingle intercepted the baseball throw and slyly lured the other players into a game of chase.

Due to public pressure, the D.A. decided quickly not to pursue a case against Lex. But Jordan was an adult, and baseball season was starting up again by the time the D.A. told Jordan that he had finally decided that no charges would be brought against him.

On the day they got the news, Jordan agreed to meet Frank and Ben at Sarah Crane's house. Ben brought the dogs along, too. Lex took Jordan's good news as if expected, but the presence of the dogs drew a response of unbridled enthusiasm. Frank thought he saw changes that went beyond the fact that his cheeks were no longer hollow, that the dark circles beneath his blue eyes were almost gone. That look of apprehension around adult men—always excepting Jordan—wasn't completely gone, but there was a little more confidence in the way he moved.

Ben saw it, too, and again thought of David. Maybe with the help of Sarah and his friends, Lex would be okay. Maybe someday Lex would find something in life that would mean as much to him as search and rescue work had meant to David.

When he had worn down from playing with the dogs, Lex sat down beside them.

Ben said, “I hear you gave a lot of help to Jordan. Got people to write letters, things like that.”

“I had to. With me and Jordan—he's my friend, but it's more than friendship. It's—what was that word you said, about the dogs? I don't think people have it so often, but they should.”

Ben frowned in concentration, but Frank remembered it first.

“Devotion.”

T
he jet-black panty hose were calling to him. The feet of the panty hose, to be precise. He knew he shouldn't look. Knew it would only encourage her. But he folded the edge of the newspaper down, giving in that much.

“Bee-yoll.” Her voice was childlike, crooning. Her puppeteer voice.

“I'm not in the mood for this, Ellie,” Bill said.

“Oh, Beeeeee-yoll.”

Her hands were all he could see of her, and not really much of her hands. The makeshift panty hose puppets were “looking” at each other.

“He's very angry with you,” the right hand admonished the left.

“No, he's not,” the left answered, then they both looked at Bill.

“I'm not angry,” Bill said to the hands, giving in a little more. Addressing the puppets now. “Not really angry. Just tired.”

“Quit distracting him. He's on an important deadline, and he has writer's block,” the right said.

“He never has writer's block,” the left replied. “He's upset about Mir.”

“The prospect of a visit from Miriam is an unpleasant one,” he agreed.

Ellie's head emerged above the edge of the breakfast table. He saw that she had cut the crotch out of the panty hose, and was wearing them over her head.

“You are the strangest woman I know,” he said, causing her to smile. Ellie considered this a grand endearment. Bill knew that.

Her head tilted a little to one side, as if studying him for a portrait. “It's fine now. Not even my evil twin can stop you.”

“She is your younger sister, not your twin,” he said, but she was leaving the table, pulling the panty hose off.

Ellie was right, as always. Not about the twin business, of course, but about the novel he was working on. He got up from the table feeling invigorated, and went straight to the computer. He had a new slant on a passage he had considered unworkable until a moment ago. This was the effect she had on him. Ellie was his Muse.

HE HAD KNOWN SHE WOULD
be from the moment he first saw her. Seven years ago, well past three o'clock in the morning on a hot summer's night, at a gas station on Westwood Boulevard. Bill supposed he would forget his own name before he forgot that night.

He had been uneasy, at loose ends. It wasn't insomnia: it's only insomnia when you're trying to sleep. He had been trying to write. It was his best kept secret then, his writing. None of his professors at UCLA, who knew him as a recent graduate in mechanical engineering, would have ever guessed it. Well-written papers and a flair for creative problem-solving didn't make him stand out as more than a good student. His friends, although from varied backgrounds and majors, held the same prejudices as the few women he had dated: they assumed that engineers were unlikely to read novels, let alone write them. His father, who expected him to come to work for the family company in September, was also unaware of Bill's literary aspirations.

In those days, Bill thought that was for the best. If he was going to fail, he preferred not to advertise it. And while he had faith in the basic idea for his novel, he had to admit it wasn't working out. Frustrated when he stalled in that place in the manuscript where he had stalled no fewer than ten times before—where the boy ought to get the girl back again—he stood up and stretched. He needed some fresh air, he decided. At least, the freshest he could find in L.A.

AND SO HE HAD RESTLESSLY
made his way down to Westwood Boulevard, head down, his hands shoved down into his pockets, his long-legged gait taking him quickly past record stores and restaurants. He glanced up just to keep from running into parking meters and lampposts, glancing at but not really seeing the boutiques and movie theaters closed for the night. The gas station was closed, too, but the sight that greeted him there made him slow his stride.

A lithe young woman was tugging on one of the water hoses most people would use for filling radiators. She was using it to wash a gold Rolls-Royce.

He came to a halt on the wide sidewalk, fascinated. She looked up over the hood, used the back of her hand to move her bowl-cut, thick, dark hair away from her eyes. Big brown eyes.

“Want to go for a ride?” she asked him.

He nodded, but didn't move forward.

“You'll have to give up hesitating if you're going to ride with me,” she said, opening the driver's door. But Bill was distracted from this edict when he saw an elderly man sleeping on the front seat.

“Wake up, Harry,” she said, gently nudging the old man, who came awake with a start. “We're taking . . .” She looked over her shoulder. “I'm Ellie. What's your name?”

“William. William Gray.”

She turned back to the old man. “We're taking Bill here for a ride on Mulholland Drive. You can sleep in the back.”

The old man reached for a cap, rubbed a gnarled hand over his face and quickly transformed himself into a dignified chauffeur, moving to hold the passenger door open for Bill, waiting patiently as Bill finally moved toward the car. Harry gave a questioning look to Ellie, now behind the wheel.

“No, you need your rest.”

Harry nodded and climbed into the back, asleep again before Ellie had started the car.

They had traveled Mulholland and beyond that night, climbing canyon roads that twisted and turned.

She was a good driver; calm and assured, not crazy on the winding roads. At first, he was afraid, wondering if he had made the biggest—and perhaps the final—mistake of his life. He started envisioning bold headlines: “Missing UCLA Student Found Dead,” or “Still No Suspects in Topanga Canyon Torture-Murder Case.” Perhaps he wouldn't be missed much. Maybe he would only rate a small article on a back page, near a department store ad: “Boy Scout Troop Makes Grisly Discovery in Canyon.”

“Either you just had a big fight with your girlfriend or you're a writer,” she said, not taking her eyes off the road. “I'm betting you're a writer.”

He hesitated, then said, “I'm a writer. Or I want to be one. How did you guess?”

“The time of day, the way you were walking. You looked frustrated, I suppose.”

“Anyone can be frustrated. Why would you think I'm a writer?”

She shrugged, then smiled a little. He waited, hoping she would answer, but she startled him by saying, “You're also a bit of a romantic.”

He laughed nervously. “That's an odd thing to say.”

“I am odd. But there's nothing odd about knowing a romantic when you see one. At three—” She glanced at the clock on the dash. “At approximately three-twenty-five in the morning, you agreed to get into a Rolls-Royce with a sleeping old man and a woman you had never met before.”

“Perhaps I just needed an adventure.”

“Perhaps. Perhaps both. So, what's your favorite movie of all time?”

“Rear Window,”
he said without hesitation.

“Wonderful!” she said, laughing but still not taking her eyes from the road. “Whose work in it do you admire, Hitchcock's or Woolrich's?”

He smiled. Many people knew that Hitchcock directed
Rear Window
. Fewer knew that it was written by Cornell Woolrich. “Both, really,” he answered. “I'm a fan of both. I've seen every Hitchcock film, with the exception of a few of the very early British ones.”

Soon they were discussing Hitchcock and Woolrich, and Bill forgot all about Boy Scouts and headlines. She had seen most of the films he had seen, read more Woolrich.

HE EASED BACK INTO THE
passenger seat, studying her. She didn't make a move toward him, didn't reach across the seat, didn't even look at him much. Every so often, finding a vista she liked, Ellie would stop the car. The first time she stopped, Bill expected her to turn her attention to him. But she didn't do more than glance at him. “Just look at it,” she said, gesturing to the carpet of city lights below. Soon he realized that was all she would ask of him—just to look at it.

At one of these turnouts, she kicked off her shoes and rolled down a window, resting her bare feet on the sill. She drove barefooted the rest of the night.

She asked him questions. He talked more that night than he had ever talked in his life. About his writing, his family, his childhood, his love of Woolrich stories and Hitchcock films and chocolate and on and on, even describing the furniture in his apartment.