One Hot Mess (27 page)

“What did she say?”

He closed his eyes, and I wasn't sure he would answer, but then he did. “Said she remembers me.”

I braced myself. Mickys sessions were more like a highspeed roller coaster than therapy.

“She smiled,” he said, and stared out the window. “Like I was her best friend in the world.” He nodded. “Invited me in. Asked if I wanted a Coke or something. Said she'd had a crush on me. That all the girls did.”

I took a careful breath, not wanting to disturb him. Trying to wait. But it was no good. He was lost in the turmoil of his past. “So Kaneasha didn't tell her about the incident.”

I knew the instant the question left my mouth that I had chosen the wrong phrase. Micky wasn't one to mince words. He was more apt to serve them whole and let you choke them down or puke them up. Didn't matter to him.

“Incident?” he said.

I caught his gaze and squeezed it tight. Despite what I knew of this man, I liked him. I couldn't help myself, and I didn't want to lose any gram of respect I may have gained during the last few months of therapy. “The rape,” I corrected.

He stared at me, then dropped onto the couch and closed his eyes. “She never told nobody. Kept it to herself. Kept it…” He turned toward me. Eyes burning with emotions I didn't even really want to understand. “She's dead.”

It took a moment for his words to sink in. Longer still to figure out how to respond. “Oh, Micky. I'm so sorry.”

“Died of an overdose.”

“Did you speak to Jamel?”

A muscle jumped in his jaw. “For a minute.”

I nodded, urging him on.

“He's …” He drew a deep breath, searching for words or thoughts or strength. I wasn't sure which. “He's been with Lavonn off and on for four years.”

I wanted to apologize again, but he cut me off.

“She got two kids of her own. Still in diapers.”

I wanted to tell him everything was all right. Jamel would be fine. Children were resilient. They made do. They soldiered on. But maybe he wouldn't be, sometimes people weren't, and quite often they didn't. I had to remind myself that I had no idea how his son would turn out, and even if I did, it wasn't necessarily my job to appease his guilt. Sometimes pain's a catalyst. Sometimes it's just pain. On a good day, with a nice waxing moon and a dynamite scrying glass, I might be able to divine the difference.

“Did he seem healthy?” I asked to fill time. “Well adjusted? Was he—”

“She got a boyfriend,” he said, and wiped his palms down the lean length of his thighs.

I braced myself. I knew enough of his childhood to guess where this was going. “And …”

“He's an ass,” he said, and jerked back to his feet.

I drew a careful breath, watched him pace, and realized I missed Mr. Pearl. Mr. Pearl's most pressing problem was that he got fidgety when his potatoes breached the boundaries of his brussels sprouts. I suggested in our first session together that he buy some of those clever, picnic-type plates that are divided into sections. He'd dubbed me a genius among therapists and has come back every Tuesday since.

Micky's problems were a little trickier. So far there had
been no talk of my astounding cleverness, but I nodded like a ruminating shaman, still hoping we'd get around to that conversation. “Perhaps you should consider that your past might be coloring your perception. Sometimes it is difficult for a person with your history to—” I began, but he turned on me, eyes afire, lips snarling.

“The boyfriends an ass!” he said.

“Okay.” I nodded, dropped the certified shrink talk, and settled back. “What makes him an ass?”

“How the fuck would I know? Some people are just—” He stopped himself, expression appalled, and sat, covering his face with his hands. “Shit!
I'm
an ass.”

“Sometimes,” I said, and didn't let myself smile.

But his mercurial moods weren't so stern. Dropping his hands, he sat up straight. His lighthouse grin peeked at me and was gone. “You're gonna be a hell of a mom, Doc.”

I considered that in shuddering silence for a moment and moved on. “What are you going to do now?”

He rested his head back against the top of my couch and drew a noisy breath. “The kid's my responsibility.”

“Partly, anyway.”

“Partly!” He was angry again, quick as lightning. “You're thinking she had a choice in the matter?”

“Didn't she?” My voice was the epitome of the calm before the storm. Him being the storm. Me being… I don't know. Maybe stupid?

“You better check your notes, Doc. Could be you forgot that I raped her?”

“Sometimes absorbing all the blame is as detrimental as accepting too little,” I said.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

I felt like shrinking under my seat cushion at his tone.
But being intimidated has never done me a hell of a lot of good. Spitting into the glaring eye of authority hasn't been so hunky-dory either, but that's another story “If you take all the blame, others won't get their fair share.”

He stared at me a second, then, “Fuck that,” he said.

I nodded, reminding myself to save the crappy shrink talk for lawyers, the board of psychology, and ugly dogs that peed on my shoes. “Okay, maybe she didn't have options about getting pregnant. But—”

“Maybe!”

“The child might not be yours. And even if he is, what then? She made her own choices after that. The drugs. The abandonment.”

“You think it's easy?” he asked. His tone was deadly calm. “You think we don't have enough problems without our damn kids raising kids?”

“Is this the part where you tell me how hard it is to be black?”

It took him a moment, but finally I caught a glimpse of chagrin in his expression. “I think I pay you enough to bitch a little.”

“If that's how you want to spend your time.”

He sighed, pragmatism overcoming dramatics. “You think she should have gotten rid of it?”

Holy crap, I couldn't even decide what to do with my plant cuttings. God forbid I be put in charge of procreation of the species. “That's not for me to decide. You know that. And even if it were, it's a moot point now.”

“She was just a kid.”

“And now
he
is,” I said. “Move on, Micky.”

He glared at me, eyes angry, but I stopped him before he could blast me with his burning ghetto logic.

“Or… you can wallow in self-pity. That's a constructive option, too.”

He paused for a moment, watching me. “Are you being facetious?” he asked finally. He sounded truly affronted. “Am I paying you a shitload of money for your sarcasm?”

“Sorry,” I said, and meant it. I needed his shitload of money to pay my shitty bills.

He glanced toward the window and swore. His posture softened a little. “What should I do?”

I tried to force myself to relax. Turns out I'm incapable. “What are your choices?”

He shook his head. “I could pay child support.”

“Without legally claiming him as your son?”

“Why not?”

I shrugged, knowing he'd realize the answer in a minute. “It might assuage your guilt,” I said.

He lowered his brows, thinking things over, then: “You think the boy wouldn't get it.”

I said nothing. Generally it's my most effective method of psychoanalyzing.

“That fucking boyfriend,” he said, and suddenly he was pacing again, striding across the room in frustration. “Fuckin' corn-fed fat-ass. Cocky as hell.” He stopped, turned toward me. “Maybe I could start a savings account.”

I watched him. “Micky, you don't even know if you're his father.”

Seconds ticked away. “Does it matter?”

“Maybe not. If you don't think it does.”

“If I'm not, it ain't through no fault of mine.”

“So you're going to make yourself pay, even if he's someone else's child.”

Tension cranked up tight, then: “You're right,” he said. “Throwing money at him would be a stupid-ass thing to do.”

I hadn't meant that exactly, but I let him talk things through.

“Stupid, shortsighted, self-centered.” He nodded in concert to his thoughts.

I gave him encouraging silence.

“Thing to do is get custody,” he said, and I managed to refrain from gasping.

he phone beside my bed rang at one of those small hours of the morning ear-tagged by God Himself for sleeping. I picked up the receiver on something like the eighty-second ring.

“Babekins!”

I winced at the nasally voice. Brainy Laney had returned to the hinterlands of Idaho for filming yesterday and wouldn't be back until Christmas Eve. I resented the fact that she was gone even more than I hated the idea that the Geekster remained. The fact that she'd left a message on my answering machine saying her Saudi friend was going to check up on Ramla's sister only made the situation slightly more palatable.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“You know I can't sleep when Angel's gone.” He sounded as chirpy as a midnight cricket, and slightly more irritating.

“I can,” I said, and blinked blurrily at the alarm. “Is it three o'clock?”

“Could be.”

“Three o'clock in the
morning!”

“Probably. Say, listen. Remember how I said I'd look into weird deaths?”

I narrowed my eyes, mind kicking miserably into a slow semblance of life. “Yeah?”

“Turns out there are a buttload of 'em. You know a gal was killed by an elephant in Tennessee last year? Course, you can't really blame the pachyderm. I mean, they'd named her Winkie. And who the hell…sorry
…heck
would—”

“I'm not too tired to drive over and kick your ass,” I said. Sometimes I'm a little crabby when people wake me at three in the morning. Sometimes I'm equally crabby at four in the afternoon, but I don't have such a convenient excuse.

Solberg chuckled as if I were joking. Since the advent of Elaine in his life, there wasn't much that could get him down. Maybe I resented that most of all.

“Okay. Okay. Anyway, there's a ton of freaky shit… sorry
…stuff
happening. Someone should write a book. Hey, you want to—”

“Solberg…” I warned.

“All right. Keep your pants on. Here it is: Guy died while scuba diving off the shore of Kauai.”

“What was his name?”

“Amos Bunting.”

I yawned. “I've never heard of—”

“But he went by the name of Steve.”

“Steve … Steve Bunting!” My mind kicked out of neutral with a painful lurch. “Holy crap!” I was suddenly wide awake. “He was a coordinator for one of the senator's campaigns. I saw a picture of him.”

“Yeah, well, he's dead now. Ran out of oxygen—”

“When?”

“What?”

I was scrambling out of bed toward my office. “When did it happen?”

“Just last month. I guess Hawaii's good for diving even—”

I hauled him up short. “What day of the week?”

“What?”

“Just tell me, damn it!”

“Thursday,” he said, and I wrote it in bloodred permanent marker on my tagboard.

WOKE EARLY on Tuesday morning. Someone would die on Friday! I knew it! Well, I knew that someone would die on
a
Friday. Or had already died. Somewhere in the world. On the other hand, maybe it wouldn't take a Ph.D. for most folks to figure that out.

After discovering Buntings demise, Solberg had scoured the Internet for other deaths related to the senator and had come up with bupkis. Knowing the Geekster's world-renowned techno abilities, I had to believe there was, then, bupkis to be found.

Shelving that information, I ran up Vine Avenue with my trusty canine at my side. Or, more precisely, I chugged along like a panting orangutan with Harlequin dragging
me all the way. Running sometimes clears my head. This time it only lubricated it. The temperature had climbed to eighty-three degrees by eight a.m. Maybe somewhere near Santas workshop, global warming is welcomed like the second coming, but L.A. is one of those cities destined to be set adrift by the melting (and therefore pissed-off) glaciers, and I gotta tell you, most of us on the West Coast aren't all that thrilled with the idea. Sweat was dripping into my eyes like Chinese water torture by the time I reached my front gate.