The Reporter (18 page)

He shrugged. “What can I tell you? Few needs. How’s this?” He held up a large blue denim shirt.

“Perfect,” she said. “Now what about underwear? Do you have underwear?”

His turn to be shy. “Well, yeah, I have underwear. You wanna look?” He opened one of the drawers and gestured to it.

“Oh, Calvin Klein! I have some just like this,” she whooped, holding up a pair of black cotton briefs with a white waistband.
“They’re a little big, but they’ll work.”

Richard dropped his head into his hands. “Okay, but do me a favor. If you’re going to return them, please don’t toss them
on my desk at the office, okay?” She giggled.

“I’ll need some socks,” she said. “One of these drawers?”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah, third drawer down, right side. But I definitely don’t have a bra.”

She laughed. “That’s okay. I don’t need a bra.”

The phone by the bed jangled, and they both jumped. Richard grabbed it. “Yeah?” he barked.

“Winn, you up?” It was Pete Capra. Richard glanced at the clock-radio on the nightstand—2:40
A.M
.

“I’m up
now!”
he said, pretending to yawn, winking at Maxi.

“Listen,” Pete growled, so loud that Maxi could hear him from across the room. “I just got a call from one of my tipsters
downtown. They’re about to haul that actress, Meg Davis, in to Sybil Brand. She
broke into Maxi Poole’s house tonight and tried to kill her!
The detectives on the case won’t take my calls, and Maxi’s not answering her phone. Poor kid—the guy told me that bitch killed
old Yukon. Maxi loved that hound. Anyway, get down there; it’s a helluva story. We’ll break in live tonight, then go with
a lead on the morning show—”

“Did she confess—?” Richard began.

“How the hell do I know?” Pete roared. “Get your ass in the car and call me on my cell; I’m going over to Maxi’s house, make
sure she’s okay. Then I’m going in to the station. I’ll fill you in while you’re driving to East L.A. This is looking like
a weird pattern to me—the Ricco woman, Maxi Poole… This nutso broad just might be Jack Nathanson’s killer.”

I
’m sorry, Mrs. Shine, you can’t ride with your daughter,” Mike Cabello told Sally. “You can follow us in your own car.” Cabello
and Johnson had arrived with the search warrant and had taken charge.

“Wait; let me at least get her a jacket,” Sally pleaded. Alex was on his cell phone talking to Neil Papiano, his lawyer. Neil
would meet them at the Sybil Brand Jail for Women.

Officer Salinas came into the living room. “We got the shoes, Detective,” he said, holding up a pair of women’s black Reeboks
in a plastic bag.

“Good. You guys done?” Cabello questioned Salinas.

“Nowhere near.”

“We can’t leave them alone here,” Sally protested.

“Stay here with them, or come in with us—suit yourself,” Cabello said. “The officers will leave a copy of the search warrant
and a list of everything they take on this table. Do whatever you like, but we’re leaving now.” He held the front door open
and gestured for Meg to precede him. Jon Johnson had already gone down to the car.

Meggie was in a daze, and Sally was in a panic. “Meg needs you with her,” Alex said, “and I want to be there to meet Neil.
Jesus, if we can’t trust
these
guys”—he tossed his head toward Salinas, who was standing there holding the bagged-up shoes— “who the hell
can
we trust? Would you please pull the door shut behind you when you leave?” he asked the officer. “It’ll lock automatically.”
He followed the disparate group out the door.

Thank heaven Alex happened to be here tonight, or I’d fall apart,
Sally thought, as they drove wordlessly behind the deputies, inbound on the Santa Monica Freeway toward the east side of
downtown Los Angeles.

Neil Papiano was waiting for them just inside the prisoners admittance doors. He updated them on what he’d been able to find
out. Earlier tonight, someone had broken into the home of Maxi Poole, the television news reporter, and threatened her life.
Evidently Ms. Poole’s dog, or a house guest who was staying with her, or both, had scared the intruder off, but not before
he, or she, had brandished a large metal cross.

Sally watched helplessly as her daughter was being put through the police booking process, while Neil continued quietly telling
them what he knew. Maxi Poole had told the investigators that she was sure the cross was the one Meg had purchased at the
Jack Nathanson auction—she’d shown that cross on the news—and Ms. Poole said she happened to see Meg Davis with it just yesterday
on the beach at Malibu.

The attorney went on to tell them that the investigators were looking for a possible connection to the murder of the housekeeper
at the Nathanson estate, who had been stabbed to death the night before with some kind of sharp, jagged instrument. Sally
and Alex had heard about it on the news.

“And of course,” Neil continued in subdued tones, “they’re looking for an ultimate link to the murder of Jack Nathanson.”

“Not Meggie!” Sally pronounced. “Meggie is not capable of killing anyone,” she reiterated to her husband and the lawyer. “I
know my daughter!”

But do I?
she wondered, as she looked up to see Meggie, who
was being fingerprinted now. She was pallid and deathly frail, and she was chanting. Sheriff’s personnel were asking her questions
but she stared straight ahead, seeming to look right through them, ignoring them, chanting.

Sally had been hearing this same dismal chant lately, filtered in the early mornings through the closed door of Meggie’s room.
Since Meggie was gone most of the time, Sally routinely scoured the room for clues to her increasingly disturbing behavior.
The notion that she was invading her grown daughter’s privacy gave way to the urgent priority that she find a way to help
her.

On Sunday morning, before her daughter left the house, Sally had spotted a makeshift shrine in Meggie’s room, dried flowers
and candles that had burned halfway down arranged around that cross Meggie had bought at the auction and that Sally would
get the bill for. The thing was perched upright atop a copy of the Bible that Sally had given her daughter years ago, its
lethal point cutting into the book’s fragile leather, the top leaning against the mirror above the dresser. Underneath the
Bible, she saw with horror, there were three pictures of Meggie, old photos of her as Hannah, the character she played in
Black Sabbat.
Sally didn’t disturb anything, but she called Dr. Cohen. “Don’t you see,” Angela had entreated, “she needs help,
real
help. You have to commit her, Sally, for her safety, and for your own.”

“What do you mean, for my
own
safety?” Sally had demanded.

“Just that in her possibly psychotic state—and yes, it could very well be psychotic, because she’s not in control—there’s
no guessing what Margaret might do. Listen to me, Sally. Give me your permission to start the legal process.”

She didn’t. She couldn’t. And now the worst had happened. Sally was gripped with terror for Meggie.

But Meggie displayed no outward fear, no emotion of any kind.
“Malign spirits will claim the revenants,”
she chanted, louder
now.
“God forsakes those who are in league with witchcraft, and evil in many forms possesses His own kindred.
… .”

One of the uniformed deputies was taking 35-millimeter booking photos of Meggie, and a female clerk was snapping Polaroids.
She took three shots, and spread them out on the counter to let them develop. Meggie’s chants resonated through the room,
and although everyone appeared to ignore her and go about their business, an eerie hush infused the usually down-to-earth
atmosphere in Inmate Reception.

After a few minutes it became apparent that no images were going to manifest on the Polaroid prints. One of the deputies whispered
to the photographer, “She was the child in that movie, you know. Maybe she
is
a witch.”

“It’s more likely that this film is defective,” the woman muttered, but still, the mood was somber.

At 5:47 Tuesday morning, Channel Six reporter Richard Winningham and his crew were jockeying for position among the local
and national television, radio, and print journalists and photographers outside the gate from the release area at the Sybil
Brand Jail for Women, all of them vying for the best vantage to catch Meg Davis being hustled out of there.

“Here she comes!” somebody yelled, and all eyes, and cameras, turned to the release gate. Winningham was stunned at the forlorn
figure of Meg Davis, looking like a latter-day Joan of Arc, her tall, lank frame draped in a drab cotton dress, her back straight
and her head held high; she was chanting some kind of dirge as she was guided to a waiting car by her attorney, her mother,
and her stepfather.

Chanting
what?
Richard asked himself, while his cameraman shot the curious scene. Something about the occult, wickedness, sin.
Black Sabbat
was the movie she was internationally famous for, and here, outside the cold, dun-colored walls of a county jail just before
dawn, the woman who had starred in it as the mystical
child marked with the sign of the witches was giving an encore performance. Winningham made a mental note to look into the
making of the film, to find out if something could have turned that child star into this seemingly demented woman.

M
axi had set Richard’s clock-radio for 7:00
A.M
. She was awakened by the news at the top of the hour, blaring the sensational
events during the night surrounding the arrest of actress Meg Davis. When Richard had left for Sybil Brand it was almost three
in the morning—she felt as if she’d just dropped off to sleep. Reaching over to the nightstand, she turned off the radio,
picked up the TV remote control, and clicked on the Channel Six morning news. Richard Winningham was on in close-up, leading
in to the footage that his crew had shot at the jail. The tape ended, revealing Richard in a wide shot standing in front of…
good God, standing in front of
her
house!

“How
could
he!” she sputtered out loud, watching as he traversed her lawn and went up her front steps, explaining, as he walked, how
the spectral figure had entered and confronted the owner of this house, Channel Six reporter Maxi Poole, along with a houseguest
who was the son of the murdered Carlotta Ricco…

Maxi was barely able to stifle the urge to throw his high-tech clock-radio at him right through his high-tech giant TV monitor
in his high-tech bedroom. As he described in detail the attack by the black-robed intruder, an
EXCLUSIVE
graphic flashed across
the
lower screen.
I’m going to kill him,
she thought. I
will kill him!
Of course he had an “exclusive”—she had spilled her guts to him in the innocent pillow talk they’d had last night.

She picked up the phone and called Pete Capra at the station. “I’m not coming in this morning, boss,” she told him. “Got hardly
any sleep last night, my dog may not recover, the bulls from the police crime lab are going to be swarming all over my house
in an hour—”

“Where the hell have you been all night?” Pete interrupted. Good—at least Richard hadn’t blabbed at the office that she’d
slept at his apartment. In his bed.

“I stayed at a friend’s—”

“When you didn’t answer your phone I went over to your place, and the Ricco woman’s son said he didn’t know
where
you were. Jesus, Maxi, why didn’t you call in?”

“To let you know I was okay, or to give you the story, Pete?” she asked, an edge in her voice. She wondered how much Richard
had told him.

“Not fair!”
he barked. “You
know
I was worried about you! Okay, okay, so I wanted the story, too—my new best friend, Mike Cabello, wouldn’t take my calls.”
Maxi had to laugh. Pete was Pete, and Pete was a newsman, arguably the best in the city.

“So where
did
you get the ‘exclusive’ I just saw on the morning show, in front of
my
house?” she asked. He told her the sheriff’s department had held a press conference at Sybil Brand after Meg Davis was released,
and the station had Winningham there, so they shifted him to her house with his crew.

“How the hell could you send him to my house?” she demanded.

“Everybody
went to your house,” Pete told her. “Finding your house wasn’t exactly rocket science. This is gonna be the lead story all
day on every newscast in the country. The whole industry is doing live shots from your front door. Your grass is gonna be
fucked!” he added.

Maxi groaned. But she was grateful that she wasn’t there. And grateful that Richard had not breached her trust after all.
That information had just saved his clock-radio and his TV tube. And he hadn’t led the caravan of news troops to her home,
either. In fact, at this very moment he was probably doing his best to keep the news gang-bang out of her geraniums, she supposed.
Not only were his TV and his clock-radio safe, she’d have to buy him lunch one day when this was all over.

“So how come you chyroned the story ‘exclusive’ if
everybody
was there, and
everybody
had it?” she asked Pete.

“You, of all people, have to ask?” he returned, with more than a hint of exasperation. “You know the idiot slaps ‘exclusive’
on every piece of shit we run! He put an ‘exclusive’ on the mayor’s press conference announcing the new metro-rail lines yesterday—the
world
was there! Sanders came up with a sidebar that they were planning a program to let neighborhood kids do some artwork for
each train station, so the idiot and the underjerk decided that we therefore had an ‘exclusive.’ Are you looking for integrity
this early in the morning? It’s a Tappenoid thing!”

Maxi sighed. Tappen was the station’s consultant company, whose job was to “consult” on its news coverage with an eye to making
the stories more glitzy, more razzle-dazzle, more compelling to the viewer. Pete and all the hard-news pros in the business
called the consultants “Tappenoids.” One night at Haley’s, the bar across from the station where newsies hung out, she had
heard Pete characterizing the “Tappenoids,” in his loud, blustery voice, as “a bunch of snot-nosed college kids and yuppie
clowns in striped shirts and suspenders who charged money for suggesting that news reporters take their pants down and tap-dance
to make a story ‘more compelling to the viewer.’”