Good to the Last Kiss (18 page)

If he dreamed that night, he didn’t remember. But for some reason his mother and father were on his mind. Didn’t know why. Maybe it was how Cobra’s smash just kind of came out of the blue. His dad would do that sometimes. A fist would just come crashing down seemingly out of nowhere and many times for no reason Earl could guess. He and his older sister would sometimes get it that way – out of the blue.

Earl could remember when he was five, how his old man jerked his thirteen-year-old sister out of the shower, her screaming and getting whacked, falling back into the tub and against the tile, naked and wet and unconscious. Blood swirling in the water. The look on his sister’s face. Earl thought she was dead. She had a strange, dreamy look.

Earl’s father stormed out and Earl stayed there staring at his sister, his naked sister with those small breasts and the small patch of hair between her legs. He had seen his sister naked before, but he turned his eyes away then. Now he couldn’t take his eyes off her. He couldn’t stop looking. She wasn’t looking back.

He stared at his naked sister, staring at that almost blissful look on his sister’s unconscious face, the odd angle of the long, graceful neck. His sister was beautiful. She had escaped, he thought. It was OK. She was beautiful and OK and free. He stared, eyes riveted on the delicate, swan-like curve of his sister’s neck until his mother came in. She was calm. She was always calm. Mean sometimes, but calm. She pushed Earl away from the doorway and went in. Somehow she managed to revive her.

‘How many times have I told you not to provoke him when he’s like this,’ his mother told his sister who was still too shaken to understand a word. Earl walked back by the bathroom again. His sister was shivering, wrapped in the towel. Earl was still thinking about earlier, about the look on his sister’s face. Again he left, but crept back one more time. His mother was drying his sister’s naked body. Earl had drifted off into some sort of reverie when the force of his father striking him lifted his feet off the floor and flung him against the wall in the hallway.

‘Fucking little pervert,’ his father said.

But that look, the look on his sister’s face. She was always agitated, confused, frightened – in pain. Always that look. But there, in the tub, she was calm for the first time. She was beautiful. Only time she was.

From then on, Earl stayed away from his family as much as he could. He stayed in the basement a lot. The other thing he did often was to go into the clothes closet, climb way in back. He’d stack things in front of him so that he would be all sealed off. He took comfort in the closeness of it, the darkness. In the summer it was cooler. In the winter it was warmer.

Inside, all curled into himself, he was safe. His father wouldn’t be able to cuff him on some strange whim, some anger no one understood. He wouldn’t hear his mother’s complaints, her saying how stupid he was. Safe from classmates who used to call him ‘termite’ because he was so small and because he chewed up his pencils, and then later called him ‘fruit’ and ‘fag boy,’ because he was small and thin and too early pimply.

No, there in the closet, reality proceeded in muffled tones, sounds blanketed by wool coats and cotton dresses.

Earl would pretend he was an animal. A squirrel or rabbit mostly. And sometimes he would take some bread inside with him. White bread. He’d roll it up in little balls and eat it and think about being an animal and sometimes he’d sleep. A squirrel or rabbit; something small and helpless and frightened, snugly and warmly hidden from the world.

Earl had no friends. In the second grade, he made friends with chubby Michael Sandinski, a sloppy, ugly kid with a whiny and ugly disposition who also had no friends. Sandinski lived a few blocks away and had a bedroom full of toys.

They had decided upon the little green miniature soldiers that had been Sandinski’s dad’s when he was a kid. Somehow, a realistically molded wild cat – a leopard or lion or something – made of white rubber was thrown in with the set. It was beautiful, Earl thought. Raring, proud, leaping, handsome, fast, powerful. More powerful than the stupid green soldier. Sandinski had no interest in the wild animal, had tossed it aside. It didn’t belong with the other plastic pieces scattered out on the floor. Earl chose it. That didn’t bother Sandinski. As they divvied up the soldiers, Sandinski picked one who stood eternally in a boxing stance, right arm giving the air an upper cut, to be Sandinski. Earl wanted to be the horse. The leopard was beautiful. Proud. Strong. Independent. Free. He wanted to be the leopard.

Sandinski said Earl couldn’t. It was a rule. A guy had to be a guy, not an animal. A guy could not be a leopard. But once Earl saw the leopard he didn’t want to be anybody or anything else. They argued. Earl punched him. A couple of times. Blood came out of the kid’s nose. Earl took his wild animal and ran.

All the cops in homicide, except Gratelli, lived beyond the city limits of San Francisco, some as far as two hours away. McClellan lived in Petaluma. Like the others, he didn’t want his kids growing up in the city. Mickey didn’t want to accidentally run into some psycho he’d put away for a few years while he was dining with his family at the local Denny’s or picking out bananas at Safeway. Distance was a good thing.

For McClellan, distance was also a great way to deal with problems at home. Travel cut four hours out of his family life. Good for him these days. But not good for Beth. She had threatened to leave before, usually in anger and the end of an argument she seemed to be the only one having. Frustrated, enraged, she had actually taken the kids to her sisters just outside Sonoma on two occasions. But this time was different. Mickey McClellan knew it. He knew it was coming, but when? Her decision to divorce him came not after he came in a few sheets too many to the wind. It came cold, quietly, at the breakfast table.

The sun was coming into the cheerful yellow kitchen. The light played in her still blonde hair. Her hair was a little shorter and her frame a little heavier than when they married. But she was still attractive. Her face, despite the fact she wore only a modest amount of makeup, was still younger than her birth certificate stated.

Beth’s voice held no anger, no sadness. Not even a trace of disappointment. McClellan knew it was coming now. He had sensed it, but didn’t even begin to understand how to keep it from happening. He wasn’t sure why he wanted to hold on, but he did.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘You really don’t need me to explain it.’

‘I’ve provided.’

‘You’ve provided, yes. And well.’

‘We have a nice house,’ he said. ‘I worked a lot of extra hours to get this, to set up Sarah and Kyle for college.’

‘Yes. We have two nice kids out of it. Made it worthwhile. In the end, Mickey, I believe we’ll both be short on regrets. That is true for me. I hope it will be true for you. We have that, our kids.’

‘Then why?’ he asked, though he really didn’t need to ask. It was more a delaying tactic until he could come up with some argument, some reason that would make sense to her. Make sense to him.

‘What we don’t have is a marriage. We have nothing in common. We don’t sleep together and when we’re awake we don’t particularly enjoy each other’s company.’

‘I don’t sleep around,’ he said.

‘You can if you want.’

‘I don’t slap you around,’ he said, instantly regretting his statement.

‘Am I supposed to be grateful for that, Mickey?’

‘No, of course not,’ he said. ‘Tell me what to do. Tell me how I can make it better.’

‘I did that five years ago. Mickey, there’s nothing here anymore. It’s a good time for us to go our separate ways. The kids are off making their own lives now. It’s about time I did.’

‘What about me?’

‘I don’t know. You’re over twenty-one. I have no more children to raise. You’re not my responsibility. You have your work. You have your friends on the force.’

‘I don’t,’ he said. ‘I don’t have any friends.’

‘What about Vincent?’

‘Vincent’s all right. We work together. He goes home, has his life. The rest of them, the others they don’t even fuckin’ like me.’ He winced when he realized he’d used the word. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t know what makes me say that.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’m used to it. From your lips, it’s like saying “apple” or “refrigerator” or something. Look, it’s over. For the last fifteen years, I haven’t been included in your life and you haven’t been interested in mine. I don’t even know who you are.’ Sadness did creep into her voice for a moment. ‘And I’m not sure you do either.’

Beth got up, went to the sink.

‘Is it somebody else?’ he asked quietly to her back.

‘You might not understand this,’ she said not turning. ‘There is someone else but had there not been we would still be having this conversation.’

Her back tensed. She was still afraid of his rage even though he had never taken it out on her. She had witnessed it. It could be devastating.

He surprised her by not getting angry. ‘Have you seen an attorney yet?’

‘Yes. The papers are being drawn up.’ She turned around to look at him.

He seemed calm. Deflated.

‘You can have everything, you know?’ McClellan said, matter-of-factly.

‘You have the right to remain silent . . .’

‘I mean it Beth.’

‘I do too. Someone needs to advise you of your rights. I don’t want everything. We can work it out.’

‘When?’

‘Soon,’ she said. ‘I can move . . .’

‘No, I couldn’t stay here. This is definitely your house, the kids’ house.’ He looked around. He nodded, smiled. ‘Definitely your house.’

‘Too big for me,’ she said. ‘We can sell it.’

They looked at each other for a moment. They seemed to understand. More than that, they seemed to agree.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

‘Me too,’ McClellan said.

‘I know what’s happened to these young girls is pretty hard to take.’

He felt very calm, almost relieved.

‘The world’s a pretty sad place sometimes,’ he said, tapping the hard edge of a manila folder on the top of the table. ‘We’ll forget about them in a while.’ It’s happening already, he thought.

He looked at Beth who had turned back to the sink.

This wasn’t how it was supposed to be. His dress blues were still new when he married Beth. He thought the future was pretty clear, pretty well planned out. McClellan fully expected to work his way up the ranks, retire while he was still relatively young, maybe have some sort of second career while on pension, have a cabin by the lake where he’d have a small boat and where he and his children and eventually their children would spend leisurely days together.

He looked forward to being a grandfather. He’d do better. He’d have the time. Life was just too screwy right now.

He’d done well by some standards. Homicide was one of those assignments nearly everyone wanted. Pretty much top of the heap. Overtime was plentiful. A couple of years, he’d earned as much as eighty-five thousand dollars. A lot of hours, yes. Base pay was fifty-six thousand. But that’s how the house in Petaluma came about. That’s how college happened for the kids.

Somewhere along the way, though, something went wildly wrong. He’d changed. He knew that. He knew why, too. He never really knew the world was as sick as it was. There were people out there willing to sell or even kill their kids because they didn’t have anything better to do that day.

Spend five years in Sex Crimes like he had and it’d be damn hard to hold on to the notion that people were basically good. There were people out there who could only get their sexual gratification from humiliation or violence or chopping up their loved one into little pieces. Look at those poor, dead, brutalized young women. Look at Julia Bateman, literally beaten within an inch of her life and then branded. She’d live with that. Maybe she wasn’t dead. But . . .

In those early days he never really understood how squalid lives could be. He did now. Only cops, firemen and ambulance attendants knew how it was. They walked into the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the attics and the cellars of strangers. They saw humanity wallowing in filth – rancid food, urine, blood and human feces. Bruised and battered babies. Animals didn’t live that way unless humans had something to do with it. They didn’t do that to each other. At first he could separate that world from his own and from the larger world where crimes and perversions were smaller. It got harder.

Would he get to see his grandchildren? He’d be a fucking strange old man by then, he thought.

‘I’ll find a place,’ he said to Beth’s back. He waited for a response. Maybe, ‘you don’t have to hurry.’ None came. He got up to leave.

‘Mickey?’

‘Yeah?’

‘I appreciate your . . . uh . . . understanding.’

‘No problem.’

He opened the folder – began to examine the list of men who went to prison about the time the murders stopped.

SEVENTEEN

T
he room surprised Earl Falwell. For one thing, it was really small. For another, there were no mirrors. This wasn’t like the interrogation rooms in the movies or on TV. Just a little five-by-six room with acoustical ceiling tile, the kind used to absorb sounds, as wall covering. The whole place made him feel a little crazy, all closed in.

‘My name’s McClellan,’ said the heavier cop, the one who looked a little bloated. ‘That’s Gratelli.’ Gratelli had deep bags under his eyes. Gratelli was pretty ugly, Falwell thought. A face you couldn’t read. Sad, dog-like eyes, thin lips. Hair in his ears.

The two cops sat across the narrow table, close enough to reach across and grab Falwell by the throat if they wanted to. But they didn’t seem excited enough to do that. They seemed kind of slow. Kind of boring. Not at all what he imagined. This was Homicide?

Falwell reminded himself to be quiet. Polite. Short answers.

‘So, Earl,’ the bloated cop said. ‘You ever been up on Potrero Hill.’