Sins of the Fathers (9 page)

Lindy knocked on the screen door, which rattled in its loose hinges. It reminded her of one of those doors on an old farmhouse. But this was Los Angeles County, not Dorothy’s Kansas.

She heard movement behind the wooden door. The creaking of the floor straining under weight. Then the noise hesitated, as if the person on the other side of the door was waiting for Lindy to do something else. Like leave.

She knocked again, softly. No need to get anybody riled up.

“Who is it?” came a deep, scratchy voice, a woman’s voice. From the hack that followed, Lindy guessed she was addressing an inveterate smoker.

“My name is Lindy Field. I’m here about Darren.”

There was a long pause. “I got nothing to say.”

“I want to talk to Drake.”

The interior door opened a crack, and Lindy could barely make out a face peering through the screen. “Drake ain’t here.”

“I think he is.”

“You a reporter?”

“I’m a lawyer.”

“Don’t believe you.”

“You see any cameras on me? Any recording equipment? All I’ve got is what you see, and you can see it’s just me. So what are you going to do?”

The woman opened the door a little wider. She wore a drab gray housedress. Her hair was streaked with gray and fell unkempt around a craggy face. Lindy could smell a mixture of tobacco smoke and burned food coming through the screen. She thought of rats.

The woman looked Lindy up and down. “You don’t look like a lawyer.”

“I went to law school and passed the bar and everything.”

Another voice, a man’s voice from within said, “Let her in, Alice.”

The woman unlatched the screen door and pushed it open slightly. Lindy pulled it open the rest of the way herself.

She walked into a dark house where all the windows were closed up and curtained. A single lamp on a table provided the only illumination.

4.

“Mr. DiCinni, you can’t hide forever.”

They were sitting now in what would have been called the living room. But the place didn’t look right for living. More like existing.

“Why not?” Drake DiCinni said. “Whoever wrote that down as some law?” DiCinni had a jutting forehead, was half bald, and wore what hair he had left close to the skin. He looked like he was wearing a rust-colored skull cap. His close-set eyes challenged her from above a small nose, which looked like it had been broken and not set properly.

The woman called Alice sat in a plastic chair near the kitchen. She had not bothered to introduce herself, nor had Drake DiCinni explained the relationship.

“The police will be looking for you,” Lindy said.

“Why? I didn’t shoot anybody.”

“Your son did. They’ll want to talk to you.”

“Everybody’s gonna want to talk to me. Isn’t that the way it goes? Shouldn’t I be on
Larry King
by now? Somebody gets shot in this country, somebody else gets to be a celebrity.”

“Your son is facing multiple murder charges, Mr. DiCinni. He’s going to need help. Your help.”

“I can’t help him.”

“He can’t help him,”Alice said.

“Alice, I can handle this.”

“My house.”

“Just let me.” He looked at Lindy, his eyes hollow. “I don’t want to testify in court or anything.”

“This is your son we’re talking about, sir. His life.”

“His life is over, don’t you get that? I tried. His whole life I tried. After his mother ran out, I tried. After he got in trouble at every school he ever went to, I tried. But he’s bad. He was born bad.”

“I don’t think that’s true.”

“You got any kids?”

Lindy shook her head.

“Then don’t tell me. I got the blood of six people on my hands, ’cause I brought him into the world.”

“You really should go,” Alice said.

“No,” Lindy said. “Not yet.”

With a sigh, DiCinni looked at Alice. “Let me talk to her.”

“Go ahead, if you want to.”

“Alone.”

Alice scowled at Lindy. “I don’t like this.”

Drake turned in his chair. Lindy saw a blue tattoo on the back of his neck. A spiderweb. “It’ll be all right,” Drake said.

“I’ll be in the back,”Alice said. “You need me, holler.”

I
’
m not going to bite him, lady
.

The woman in the gray dress walked out of the room, dripping attitude.

“So what do you want?” DiCinni said.

Lindy took a legal pad out of her briefcase and clicked open a ballpoint pen. “Start by telling me about Darren, his mother, you, his birth. Start there.”

DiCinni stared into space, his lips tightening. “His mother ran out. When he was barely a year old. What kind of a woman does that?”

“What was her name?”

“I don’t want to talk about her.”

“Just the name?”

“Look it up.”

Was this going to be the drill? She’d ask a question and get a head butt in return? One of her old law professors, Everett Woodard, used to tell the class you shouldn’t rep somebody unless you walked a mile in his moccasins. Tried to get in his head, understand his life situation. Same for key witnesses. Do that,Woodard used to say, and you’ll be well ahead of the other guy.

She tried to put herself in Drake DiCinni’s moccasins. The guy’s son had just murdered six people. Something that bad happens to a man, he’s going to be messed up.

“Mr. DiCinni, I don’t want to make things hard on you,” Lindy said. “I just want to get at the facts here, best I can. And then leave you alone.”

He shook his head and looked at the floor. “Trudy,” he said. “She was a hooker. I was working as a bartender. She used to come into my place all the time. I’d listen to her. She liked that. I saw something in her. Maybe it was just that she talked to me nice. Nobody did much of that when I was growing up.”

“Where was this?” Lindy said. “Where you were a bartender?”

“Vegas.”

“Okay.”

“So I guess we sort of circled around each other then figured out we were maybe in love. You don’t need to hear the whole thing. She got pregnant and wanted to get married. Funny, huh? Just like in the old days. The chick wants to get married. So we did. But I made her go into detox first, and she wanted to.”

“What was she hooked on?”

“Meth.”

Lindy jotted a note.
Brain damage? Mother on drugs.

“Anyway,” DiCinni said, “this and that, Darren is born and—”

“Was he okay? I mean, any details of the birth that you need to tell me about?”

“Nothing. He was a little small, I guess.”

“How small?”

“I don’t remember that stuff.”

“Go on.”

DiCinni heaved a deep breath. “Look, we didn’t have much to live on, she couldn’t get a job. I don’t know, the pressure. You’re in a one-room with a baby all the time. She couldn’t take it, so she just leaves.”

“Where is she now?”

“Dead.”

“How?”

“She went back to the old life. Some cop calls me one night at three in the morning, says she’s been found in an alley. Good riddance, I say.”

Sentimental fellow.
Lindy tried to imagine him testifying in court.

What impression would he make? Would it help or hurt Darren?

“Let’s talk about the gun,” Lindy said. “How’d Darren get it?”

“I kept it locked up. The lock was broken. The cops must have figured that out.”

“I don’t know what the cops have figured out yet.”

“Well, that’s what happened. I used the thing for hunting. I actually hunt and eat what I bag.”

“Not much hunting around here, is there?”

DiCinni shrugged. “I haven’t done much lately.”

“You show Darren how to shoot?”

“I took him a couple of times, sure. Out in the desert. But I taught him to respect the gun, what it could do, and never to use it when I wasn’t around.”

“Was Darren a problem the last few years? Around home?”

“Nothing that’d make you think he’d ever do something like this.”

“Is there anything you can think of, anything at all, that can help me understand why Darren would ever do such a thing?”

Drake DiCinni’s mind suddenly seemed to shift to a different place, the way an abrupt realization momentarily takes over the body. The air seemed to snap with static, with an electric charge that felt like the key to the whole case
.

But just as suddenly Drake’s face changed from comprehension to disregard. “What are you asking me that for?”

“Because,” Lindy said, “you are in the best position to know.”

Drake stood up. “Get out. I have nothing more to say to you.”

“Mr. DiCinni—”

“I’m through talking.”

“You have to help him.”

“He can’t be helped, don’t you get that? You’re just a little cog in a big machine. You think you’re in control of anything on earth? You control nothing. Now get out of here and leave me alone.”

5.

Riding to Roxy’s, Lindy thought about the hatchet jobs some fathers did on their kids. She felt her own wound again, knowing she always would. There was no medicine for it, for what fathers did.

Roxy Raymond lived in an apartment on Sherman Way in Canoga Park. Not the best section of town, but a good place for getting back on your feet after visiting the abyss. Roxy had been an investigator with the PD’s office when Lindy was there, but an addiction to Ecstasy ended that. Lindy helped Roxy through the detox.

Roxy opened her door holding a red can. “I’m hunting cockroaches. Come join the fun.”

Roxy had some sort of Mediterranean blood in her, mixed strikingly with a large dollop of Scandinavian. Long black hair, dark skin, sky blue eyes. Lindy knew it was the kind of look that drove men mad, made them do crazy things in the night or conjure wild dreams in daylight.

“You don’t have to do the cockroach thing,” Roxy said. “But if you see one, yell, ’cause I’m in the mood to kill. These babies are big.”

Her apartment was simple, eclectic. Roxy had her watercolors, unframed, attached to the walls, and some kind of unidentifiable fabric on the floor doing an imitation of a rug. The place smelled of incense and dishwater. R&B played softly in the background.

And on the coffee table, which had various scuffs, lay a big, black book.

“I’m glad you called,” Roxy said. “Let’s go do something. I’m feeling cramped in here.”

Lindy eyed the black book as she sat on the sofa. “Since when are you reading the Bible?”

“Since a month.” Roxy tossed herself on a beanbag chair that might have done duty in the Berkeley of the sixties.

“What’s the occasion?”

“Met a guy.”

“A Bible salesman?”

“An artist, wiseacre.”

“He’s got you reading the Bible?”

Roxy pointed at herself with both index fingers. “I took the plunge. Baptized and everything.”

“Like in water?”

“Duh.”

Lindy was amazed, but only somewhat. Roxy did have a spontaneous personality.

“Hey, come to church with us.” Roxy sat up, like she’d just had the greatest idea in the world.

“Church?”

“Why not?”

“I haven’t been in a church since . . .” Since her mother died.

“Come on. We have a great minister—”

“Who is this guy? Where’d you meet him?”

“At group.”

“He’s an addict?”

“Nah, he was there supporting a friend of his. We started talking, one thing led to another . . .”

“And
boom
, you’re Mother Teresa.”

“Hey now . . .”

“Sorry. I’m a little tense. You got anything to drink?”

“Like what?”

“I was thinking of the hard stuff. Dr Pepper.”

“I’ve got diet.”

“I said the
hard stuff.
”

“Sorry,
chica
. You have to drive.”

Roxy went into the kitchen and returned with a couple glasses of Diet Dr Pepper.

“You ready to go back to work?” Lindy asked.

“Yeah baby!”

“I might have a case for you to help me with.”

“What kind?”

“Murder.”

Roxy whistled.

“If I take it. It’s the boy who shot those kids in the park.”

Roxy froze midgulp. She lowered her glass silently.

Lindy told Roxy what she knew so far, up through the interview with Drake DiCinni.

“Guy sounds like a real loser,” Roxy said.

“And that’s what’s sticking in my throat.”