Hot Shot (25 page)

“My God. You would have won in any court. With your money and her past? You didn't have to kill her.”

“I didn't mean to! I didn't take her seriously. All she had was that house. She didn't have enough money to hire any lawyers. I told her that. I told her to leave me alone. And then she called back the next week and told me she was going to write a book for Danziger Press, for a lot of money.”

Betty reached into her pocket for a cigarette, but the pack was empty. Her hands were shaking. She dropped it. A puff of wind carried it over the bluff.

“That woman was going to use her book advance to fight me in court. I begged her to think of Richie. I told her that everything in her past would come out in court. He lost his father; now he needs to see the two of us mud-wrestling in front of some judge? I thought I got through to her. But then she called me again. She'd signed the contract and the book was on. So I went down to Mexico to talk to her, to try and shake some sense into her. But I swear to God, I never meant to kill her. It just happened.”

“What ‘just happened'?”

“I'd taken as much money as I could with me. She'd been bribed once, I figured she could be bribed again. But she was firm. She wanted Richie back. I asked her, How can you have him
back
when you never had him in the first place? It started as an argument. Then it turned into a fight. A real fight. We were rolling around on the floor. I don't know what happened. I swear to God, I still don't know what happened. It was only seconds. But she was dead. It happened. It just happened. And then I got out of there as soon as I could.”

“When you adopted Richie, you really thought you'd never have to deal with Felina again? It never occurred to you she might come back for him?”

She sighed, weighing how much to tell me. It didn't matter; I knew it all now anyway.

“Felina had just found out she was very sick. We thought it was— We thought she didn't have very long.”

“But she got better instead.”

“Yes. She got better. She thought she was cured.”

“What was wrong with her?”

“Cancer. Breast cancer. Frankly, we didn't think she had more than a year or two to live.”

“Don't bullshit me anymore, Betty. Felina didn't have breast cancer.”

Eduardo Lopez had told me. The word he kept repeating—the word I heard as “seeda”—wasn't a word at all. Roy Cruz had translated it. It was an acronym.
SIDA. Síndrome de inmuno deficiencia adquirida.

Felina must have gone to Mexico desperate for a cure. I'd seen the pills, the vitamins, the Zuni fetishes. Walking through the streets, I'd also seen the black-market
farmacias
that dispensed all kinds of herbs and snake oil, along with dubious versions of protease inhibitors and AZT. Tailor-made for a desperate woman with a New Age bent.

But there are some things in life that a handful of herbs and
la águila
can't cure.

The sun went behind another cloud, turning the bay from blue-green to gunmetal gray. False dusk.

“Did Dick have it?” I asked.

No response.

“Do you?”

“No.” Performance or not? I couldn't tell anymore.

“Does Richie?”

Betty started to cry again. “Why are you doing this to us? I'm not a homicidal maniac. I'm not. Until that night, I'd never thought I was capable of—”

“Is that little boy HIV-positive?”

Her head jerked up in a fury.

“
Why?
If I told you he was, would it make one damn bit of difference? Would it change what you intend to do to us?”

Would it?

If I told the police what I knew, a woman would go to jail and leave her child parentless. That was tough, but that was Betty Mann's own fault. I could live with that.

But if that child was terminally ill, could I take him away from the one person in his life who could offer him love and stability and the financial means for a healthy life?

And if I did, just for the sake of a story that never was important in the first place, was I any better than Betty Mann herself? Or Felina Lopez? Or Leo Lazarnick?

Once everything I knew about reporting seemed forged in steel, stark as black and white. A binary system: truth and lies. One was good; the other, bad. But now the world and my place in it were shades of gray that kept shifting.
The rules have changed,
Gina Guglielmelli had told me, laughing. And they had. At least the tab reporters of the world had their own bedrock beliefs, sleazy as they were. Once I thought I had a value system, too, but my beliefs were no more solid than the bluffs where I stood.

“Would it make a difference?” Betty demanded. “Would it?”

“I don't know.”

Eduardo Lopez was a good man who had loved Felina. He was also a terrible father who had rejected his daughter at the time she needed him most. Betty Mann was a woman who had committed the worst crime imaginable. She was also, without a doubt, a good mother. And her fate, and the fate of a little boy, lay in my hands, and I felt like a toddler holding a hand grenade.

“I think so,” I said slowly. “Yes, I think it would make a difference.”

“It would?”

“Not for you. For him. They're your sins. Not his.”

Something in the air between us shifted.

“I believe you,” she said. “God help me, I shouldn't, but I believe you.”

A couple walked past hand in hand. We were silent for a moment.

“So. Is he?” I asked gently.

Betty closed her eyes. A jogger went past, sneakers slapping against the wet grass. She waited until he was out of earshot. The taut balloon of tension between us had dissipated. All the air was gone.

“He's been tested every six months since he was born. And he's fine. We both are.”

“I'm glad.”

“Thank you.”

Her voice was a whisper. False dusk was gone. The light was fading for real now, and the lifeguard shacks on the beach stretched long shadows across the sand.

I handed back the envelope.

“I guess that's what I needed to know,” I told her, and walked away down the darkening bluffs.

19

S
ILLY SEASON, WE CALLED IT
: the long, hot California summer and the outrageous media circuses that it spawned like hurricanes. Vernon Ash's trial was a silly season story. So were the deaths of Felina Lopez and Dick Mann. But when Betty Bradford Mann surrendered to authorities at the end of that summer, silly season reached a pitch of unprecedented proportions.

First, there were the legal questions to be straightened out. An American citizen had allegedly murdered (even in my own mind, I was saying
allegedly
) another American citizen on Mexican soil. That was already a few years' work for a minor galaxy of bilingual lawyers. Susan D'Andrea and her ilk hit the ground spin-doctoring. And the tabloids, which had already put Dick Mann and Felina Lopez's deaths on the back burner, sank their chops into Act III of the drama, which promised to be the juiciest yet.

In the synod of
Headline Journal
watchers and
Celeb
readers, I knew there would be no doubt as to who was the wronged party here. Betty Bradford Mann wasn't a television actress to them; she was a maltreated widow trying to raise her son the best she could. Felina Lopez was a greedy hooker who wasn't just satisfied with Betty's husband; she had to have her son, too. If Felina ended up with a toe tag instead of custody—well, it wasn't right, but it wasn't completely unjustified, either.

“Lana Turner,” Lydia told me. “With Douglas Sirk directing. Lots of great suffering scenes, lots of great costumes. Ann Blyth or Dorothy Malone in the Felina part.” She sighed. “But they don't make movies like that anymore. And
that's
why I watch Court TV, Kieran.”

Lydia had a point. I wasn't surprised, a few days later, when I picked up a copy of
Biz
and saw that a cable network had commissioned a script for
Desperate Measures: The Betty Bradford Mann Story.

An arraignment date was set. The legal teams fought for position. And a nation of Madame Defarges sat back, taking up remote controls instead of knitting needles, and waited.

*   *   *

This was the Zeitgeist—at least, what I was able to glean when I looked up from my computer. I had a book to revise and rewrite.

At the end of the week, I'd written 125 more pages. This time it flowed. Maybe it wasn't a story worth telling, but I felt I'd told it well.

And Jack Danziger threw a dinner party to celebrate.

The guest list was petite, at my insistence: just Jack, Kitty, Elise, her partner Beth, Jocelyn, and me. Jack had wanted to invite “just
one
columnist,” but I'd put my Converse high-topped foot down. I didn't want to dress up and I damn sure didn't want to answer any questions. Jocelyn had already suggested that I take on a publicist “just for a couple of months, Peaches,” but I put my foot down there, too, so she stayed busy earning her fifteen percent by fending off all media requests for interviews.

Claudia begged off the night of the party. She was too busy with Café Canem, or so she claimed, and I didn't press the issue. That night, I pulled on a T-shirt and shorts and drove out to Hancock Park, Lydia chattering away in the passenger seat.

As it turned out, I couldn't have made a better choice of dinner partner. Kitty and Jack were captivated by her, and she by them. I shoveled Elise's eggplant lasagna into my face and said barely a word through the whole dinner.

“What I still don't get,” I said when the sorbet arrived, “was how Frank Grassley got my name.”

“What do you mean?” asked Jocelyn.

“We'd kept the book under wraps to that point. Felina's murder hadn't even made the paper. Hell, Jack was thinking about invoking
force majeure
and canceling the whole project. Then Grassley called Jack, out of the blue. He knew about the project and he knew I was working on it. Up till then, it had been a secret, remember? And the next day,
Headline Journal
showed up at my front door and all hell broke loose.”

“He's a reporter, Kieran,” said Lydia. “Y'all have your sources.”

“Yeah, but Grassley's not a
good
reporter. I mean, he must have gotten a tip, but … it's just puzzling.”

“It doesn't matter, dear, does it?” said Kitty. “After all, it saved the project.”

I narrowed my eyes at her. A conversation floated back to me, a conversation we'd had in the parking garage at Danziger Press:
Let me see what I can do, then … The book will happen. One way or another. I promise.

“Kitty…”

She looked up and smiled her batty old-lady smile at Elise. “Dear, this sorbet is just wonderful. You're going to have to get me the recipe.”

*   *   *

Two days later, Lydia went back to Louisiana. The official explanation was that the house had gone to hell in her absence, but I knew better. All she'd wanted was a little attention, and once she'd gotten it, she found that she genuinely missed Charlie, Teddy, and Melinda. She had a business to run and a family to tyrannize. Her departure made the apartment seem empty.

Empty, of course, for Claudia and me.

Even then we never discussed what had happened.

Sometimes you don't realize that you've been adrift for years, until one day when you look up and find you can't see land anymore. Claudia had just realized the truth before I did. It was no one's fault, really. I was still naive when it came to relationships, and a little ‘commitment-challenged,' but I knew that we'd always love each other, even if we weren't in love with each other. Perhaps that had been our strongest bond all along.

A few book offers came Jocelyn's way, but I didn't want to think about them for a while. Instead, I spent my last free days before the publication of
Mann's Woman
walking on the beach, taking in a few movies, and playing with my new computer. I still went to the corner and got the paper every morning, but these days I found myself throwing out everything but the real-estate listings.

There was a one-bedroom over in Ocean Park that sounded good, and a loft space down in the canyon that would be available in a month or two. Brenner had even offered to put me up in his spare room for a while, but I wasn't really in any hurry.

Claudia's couch was more comfortable than the one at the Beverly Hillshire anyway.

*   *   *

I was lying on Claudia's couch one morning wearing her old Saints jersey and playing on the laptop, when the doorbell rang.

The woman on the porch was twenty-six or twenty-seven, with floppy brown hair that hung down into her eyes. She wore a dark suede blazer over a man's dress shirt and a pair of boots. Her build was average, with the exception of a chunky butt that filled out her jeans. Under her arm was a large cast-iron stew pot.

We looked at each other for a long, appraising moment, and I felt something in the base of my spine begin to stir and tickle.

“For you,” she said, and handed me the stew pot.

I lifted the lid. Steam curled. Squiggles of fusilli floated on top of the broth, and a divine aroma of vegetables and herbs drifted up with the steam.

“Minestrone,” the woman said. “I made it myself last night.”

“Smells great.”

We hadn't taken our eyes off each other.

Finally, she laughed and took a tape recorder out of her bag. “Well, do I have to stand out here all day, O'Connor?”

I laughed, too, and then I stepped back and invited Gina Guglielmelli in.

Also by Kevin Allman

Tight Shot

HOT SHOT
. Copyright © 1998 by Kevin Allman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.