Strawgirl (16 page)

Bo listened to her stomach growling and tried not to remember the ice-cold poultry by-product sandwich provided by the airline for lunch. It had been accompanied by one miniature chocolate mint, frozen solid. "What's this lawyer's name?" she asked.

"Gentzler.Solon Gentzler. Has a practice in L. A. but spends most of his time running up and down the state filing amicus briefs for the ACLU in religious freedom cases. He's the one that handled the Freeway Witch two years ago, remember?"

Bo grimaced. The Freeway Witch had been nothing more than a women's studies graduate student who at Christmas spelled "Mary Was Used" in twinkling lights along the chain link fence bordering a rental property she shared with three other graduate students. The fence was visible for a mile and a half in both directions along I-805, and had so incensed members of a nearby fundamentalist group that they'd petitioned the city council for removal of the lights as a violation of community standards of decency. Gentzler had gotten miles of publicity for the concept of free speech by leaking to the press elaborate defenses that would, in fact, never be needed since the student would graduate and take a job in South America within months, the petition forgotten. A radical lawyer on the case could prove to be a threat, Bo realized. Could confuse the real issue, which was simply the preservation of Hannah Franer's sanity.

"I'll need to see Gentzler," she told the detective. "What's his number here?"

Reinert provided the number, puzzled. "What do you need to see him for?"

"Oh, just to get a sense of what he thinks of Massieu," she answered vaguely. "Technically, I'll have to hang on to this case until Hannah Franer is located. It can't be transferred or closed until then. I have to document everything I can about the suspected perp so that if Hannah is found and returned—"

"Yeah, yeah," Reinert interrupted. "Except thanks to you the poor kid's been ripped off to Canada with some loony. Great work, Bradley."

"Thanks, Dar. It's so good to know I can count on your support."

Gentzler would be sure to foul up the plan worked out with Eva Broussard. He'd operate from an agenda featuring the rights of an accused man, not the uncodified rights of a vulnerable, hurt child to heal. Bo lay her head on her desk and groaned. At this rate she might well find herself waiting tables at some desert truck stop by the end of the month, and for nothing. But maybe she could convince Solon Gentzler to back off, diminish the focus of media attention on Paul Massieu, wait for the police to wise up and find the real killer. Maybe.

"You're back!" Estrella exclaimed, lurching through the door burdened with case files, a briefcase, and a white paper bag from which rose the odor of the forbidden.

"French fries." Bo replied. "I'll pay anything. I'll wash your car with imported shampoo, train Mildred to howl 'Cielito Lindo' under your window, paint a brooding portrait of Henry for your mantel ..."

"My car's clean, I despise 'Cielito Lindo' and so does Mildred, and Henry doesn't brood." Estrella grinned. "You've forgotten that French fries are fattening. So what happened in New York? Madge got so upset when she heard you blew it that she publicly threatened to wire your desk with plastic explosives. She mentioned fire ants, too. And something about a sheet metal box in the blazing sun."

"Madge watches too many old movies on TV." Bo nodded. "And what she's really done is to put me on probation and threaten to terminate my employment. But I'll tell you what really happened for everything in that bag."

"Deal."

As the story progressed Bo noticed Estrella's expression run the gamut from mere interest to near-Presbyterian disapproval. The latter was so incongruous Bo had to laugh.

"See?" Estrella shook a pencil at the space between her desk and Bo's. "You're laughing. This isn't funny. You're a party to evasion of a court order. You've gone too far this time, Bo, and if you're not crazy you'll meet this Broussard woman and Hannah when their plane lands tonight and take Hannah straight to the county receiving home. You filed the petition yourself. You can't just turn around and decide you don't think she should be in the system. She's already in the system and you're already in trouble! This is dangerous, Bo. You wouldn't be doing this if you were—"

"If I were what? Still taking lithium?" Bo experienced a bitterness that by now felt dusty, historical. How many times in one day would she have to defend a decision that, while unorthodox, was obviously right?

"Let's get something straight," she began, standing to lean backward against her desk, her arms crossed over a stomach already protesting the greasy food she'd just wolfed. "There's no question that even the best foster home would be damaging for Hannah right now. Madge would chew off her own right hand before bending the rules enough to let Hannah stay with Eva. The job here is, ostensibly, to protect children. And lithium or not, the only way to protect this child is to break the rules. I'm sick of hearing how I should be on medication every time I exercise what amounts to simple common sense. It's not my fault this system's a factory, and it's not your job to measure every decision I make for symptoms of madness. Either you're my friend and you trust me, or you're not and you don't. Which is it?"

"Wow!" Estrella breathed beneath raised eyebrows. "Okay, okay. We're friends. I trust you. And from what you've said, you're right about Hannah. But Bo, if this gets out you're not only out of a job, you could go to jail for contempt of court!"

Bo felt her lips curl in an impish grin. "I've got an ace in the hole. No problem."

"What ace?"

"A proposal of marriage.Fairly wealthy guy but a bit stuffy for my taste. Still, it's a backup if prison looms."

Estrella looked as if she'd swallowed a Ping-Pong ball.

"LaMarche? You're kidding!"

"Tell you about it later when I pick up Mildred from your place. Right now I have to call a lawyer, go see Massieu in jail, and meet Eva and Hannah on a 5:56 flight."

After Solon Gentzler agreed to a Saturday breakfast meeting and seven phone calls finally isolated the fact that Paul Massieu had accidentally been taken to the county jail rather than the city jail where he should have been, Bo scanned her desk for anything that couldn't wait until Monday. In the pile of pink phone memos were six more denying the existence of Jonas Lee Crowley's father, eleven that could wait, and one with no call-back number.

"Satan called," the last message told her. "Will phone again."

Probably a prank, she told herself. Maybe just a joke by somebody in the message center. Some joke. Crumpling the pink slip to a tight ball, she banked it off the wall and into the wastebasket.

"Nice shot," Estrella observed.

"I hope so," Bo answered. Outside the office window a eucalyptus tree shuddered as the afternoon began its descent toward darkness.

John D. Litten left the boy's club at 5:10, near the end of the business staff's Friday afternoon exit. Most people left early on Friday. Litten made it a point to be seen keeping precisely the hours demanded in his job description. Always.

He would have liked to hang around awhile, maybe watched some kids in one of the playrooms. But he'd done that last week under the guise of inspecting a sand table for possible replacement. A little boy in nylon shorts had repeatedly brushed Litten's thigh as the child pushed a plastic alligator through the sand. Leaving, Litten had pulled off his suit jacket and carried it casually over the bouncing bulge in his pants. He'd barely made it to the men's room. Too dangerous right now to play around like that. Probably too dangerous to stay in town.

In the hospital's parking lot he waved to Ben Skiff and considered closing the whole San Diego operation. It had been easy to set up, no big deal to let go of it. In these border towns it was a joke how easy it was to find just the right woman, desperate for money and more than willing to look the other way for enough of it. Some woman as stupid and hungry as Gramma. All you had to do was set up the place, hire the woman, let her handle it, and drop in from time to time for a little noontime delight. If things got hot, you just walked. No way to trace a property rented in the name of some dead guy from another state.

He'd learned to do that in the navy, too. When John Litten discovered that close to ten thousand dollars' worth of equipment was missing and traced the paper to a career noncom named Verlen Piva, Piva made a deal. In exchange for learning how Piva was saving up a nice nest egg for his retirement from the navy at thirty-five, Litten would ignore what he'd discovered. It was, Piva told him, the simplest thing in the world to walk into any town, check the old newspaper obits for the name of some guy near your age who'd bought the farm when he was a kid. Then you could get copies of the dead guy's birth certificate. With this you could get a Social Security card, driver's license, open bank accounts in Mexico where the IRS couldn't touch you. Instant identity. Untraceable.

The rest of Piva's lesson, about fencing off military equipment to surplus stores and a hundred organizations like the Ku Klux Klan, fell on deaf ears. John Litten had a better idea and a different need entirely. As soon as he got out of the navy he tried it. And it worked.

There'd been one foul-up in Gulfport, Mississippi, when they'd nearly nailed him. But he'd put on his old uniform, murmured something at the bus terminal about trying to get home to Montgomery, Alabama, before his mama died of cancer there in the hospital, and beat it out of town. In Mobile he'd got off the bus and hitchhiked to Miami, where it had been easy to start all over. It was always easy. John Litten sometimes wondered who his father was, because his mother's family put together didn't have the brains he had in his little finger. Still, he always kept a couple of military uniforms pressed and ready. People loved to believe a man in uniform was honest. And he didn't settle in any more small towns. Only big cities where nobody knew anybody's business. Or cared.

Back in his apartment John Litten nuked a frozen dinner and knocked it back with a line of cocaine and two ice-cold cans of Yoo-Hoo. The milky drink tasted just like the stuff called Chocolate Soldier when he was a kid. Jonny Dale couldn't have Chocolate Soldier very often. Just watery powdered milk Gramma got in big boxes from the county. Now John D. could have as much as he liked. And anything else he liked.

Selecting a Scandinavian video from his collection hidden beneath a false floor in a kitchen cabinet, he watched a skinny blond boy suck off a fat man wearing nothing but a feather boa and a Viking helmet. The video was an old one. Boring. He'd only bought it for the scene where the naked children throw cake batter on each other in a kitchen. That was classic. But the fat man was a downer. Litten didn't even bother to jerk off. He had something else on his mind. Something different and more exciting than any video. And what it felt like was revenge.

Last night had been risky, breaking into that church. And then when he'd stumbled against a podium or something up there on the left side of the altar and all of a sudden that church song called the doxology was blaring, echoing in the emptiness, and he'd dropped the spray paintfrom his plastic-gloved hand and run like hell out into the night, that was scary. The music had followed him out into the dark where he'd crouched inside a huge bougainvillea and watched as a guard and two nuns scuttled through the open church door and turned on the lights. The music had stopped then, but he knew it was the doxology. Gramma took him to a Baptist church in Estherville sometimes. They sang it there, too. He wondered if the music was a message from Gramma that she liked the way he was getting even with the stupidity. Except Gramma had been stupid, too. So maybe it was just nothing.

But today wasn't nothing. Today at work, when the newspapers came and everybody was reading them with their coffee and talking about Satanists painting the church, John Litten felt something even better than he felt with the kids. He felt control. An immense control that reached out over a whole city like an invisible hand. His hand. He had them all in his hand. All the stupid assholes who thought they knew something. The police, the newspapers, the churches. And that woman named Ganage who'd started the whole thing with her stupid crap about Satan. They wanted a Satan? He'd give them one. And squeeze their nuts until they saw themselves for what they were. Stupid. Inferior.

He'd started today. Just made a few phone calls. To the police detective named Reinert, to the stupid social worker or whatever she was who messed up getting the dead kid's sister, to the psychologist, Cynthia Ganage. They were all stupid. The messages were all the same.

Padding into the kitchen in Gold-Toe socks, John Litten replaced the videotape in its hiding place, made sure he had enough coke for a couple of lines later, and shoved the two Yoo-Hoo cans and the frozen dinner tray into the trash compactor. He felt like Superman, like a king, like somebody who can tell Superman and every king in the world exactly what to do. Like somebody who can kill Superman and all the kings if he wants to. And he does. They're all so stupid he wants to kill them, but there are too many.

Changing to a Hawaiian shirt and Bermuda shorts to look like a tourist, Litten headed out for the strip where the youngest hookers hung out. He'd bring one back for a while maybe. Dress her up in the angel costume. But the prospect held little excitement.

What was exciting was the game he was playing with a whole city of morons. And the fact that when the time came, he was going to kill one of them just for being stupid. He wondered which one it would be.