Authors: James Scott Bell
Emotional state? What was I, a lab rat?
“—and that included an assertion of fact that he was not, I think the word was
involved,
with other women, and now counsel has asked about a woman I assume he is going to link to Mr. Gillen. Doing so would have a bearing on Mr. Gillen’s veracity. So I will overrule Ms. Bedrosian’s objection.”
I felt bad enough, but now Nikki’s name was dragged into this thing. A complete innocent.
“That is unfair,” I said. “Nikki McNamara is a friend, someone I know from church. That’s it.”
Jennings snatched something from the podium. He put it in front of me. It was an 8-by- 10-inch photograph, in full color. Taken with a telephoto lens. Me, embracing Nikki in the courtyard of Gower Pres.
My mind blew up in a million pieces. I glared at Jennings. His smug face glared back. “You slime,” I said. “You hired some guy—”
“Mr. Gillen,” the judge said. “No question has been asked.”
“How can you allow this?” I said to him.
“Mr. Gillen, please wait for a question.”
What a farce.
“Who is pictured in this photograph?” Jennings asked.
“How did they ever let you practice law?” I said.
Troncatti snorted in the gallery. That was, as they say, the final nail in the coffin. Or my heart. I was dead.
Jennings took the photograph away. “Your Honor, I don’t think I can get anything more from the witness that will be of use to the court. We are ready to submit this matter to you.”
“Anything else for this witness?” Judge Winger asked Alex.
“No, Your Honor,” my lawyer said.
What more could there be? Every time my lips moved I dug a deeper hole.
“You may step down,” Judge Winger told me.
My body moved out of the witness box. As I walked by Paula I thought she had a little look of sympathy there. The way a hunter looks at a wounded lion right before he finishes the job.
“Any further evidence?” Winger said.
“No, Your Honor,” said Alex.
“It has been a long day for all of us,” Judge Winger said. “I understand that, having been on this side of the legal fence for twenty years. I will take the matter under submission.”
W e are at the arcade in the mall because Maddie wants to see me shoot baskets.
It is not as easy as it looks, even to a former jock like me. The rim is smaller than regulation and balls are extra bouncy. So you have to put the ball perfectly through the hoop or else clunk it in off the backboard.
I choose clunk.
The balls come fast off the canvas that catches them. The unforgiving clock ticks down.
Maddie is cheering. “Come on, Daddy! You can do better! Come on!”
Her voice is practically begging me.
I drop about five bucks’ worth of tokens into that stupid game, but manage to win enough tickets to get us something from the lower-end shelf.
Maddie doesn’t care. I am her hero. Ticket man.
She presses her nose against the glass, quickly scanning the items. She finds no attraction in the Chinese finger trap, or the loudly colored plastic geckos, or the giant wax lips.
No, for some reason she chooses a red kazoo.
“You sure you want that?” I say.
“Yes! You can toot with it.”
“What about a nice gecko?”
She looks at me like I’m weird.
“Okay,” I say, “get the kazoo.”
Which is a mistake. All the way home, it is kazoo time. Only Maddie is not playing any tunes. She’s talking. Talking through the kazoo.
ZIZIZZMOBZZZZIZBUBZIZZIZWUBZIZIZIZ
“Maddie, take the—”
ZIZZYMUBOOOIZZYZABBOOZOOOY
“I can’t understand—”
ZIZZYZOOOBOOIZZYOOO
All the way home, and into the apartment. And finally I lose myself in laughter, pick her up, turn her upside down, and say, “Oh yeah? Oh yeah? Then ZIZZYOBBYZIZZYOZIZZY to you, too!”
We fall on the sofa, laughing our heads off.
It was not a good night, beginning with the evening news. Local channels 4 and 7 made me their lead story. Lead story! When they had several choice murders to choose from and a highspeed chase down the Harbor Freeway.
This town sure has its priorities straight.
I flipped back and forth, but watched channel 4 first. The talking head who was reading the news—Mr. Mousse, I called him, for his helmet of hair—had a smirk on his face when he announced the next story. Behind him, the pop-up graphic shows my own, undignified kisser in an attitude that is a mixture of bug-eyed rage and a sort of Kathy-Bates-in
Misery
insanity.
“Some major testimony today in the Paula Montgomery custody dispute,” Mr. Mousse said.
They pulled back to a two shot that includes the female portion of this tag team, a gorgeous blond who seemed to be having a great time in the studio tonight.
“We finally heard from Paula M’s ex, didn’t we?” she said. “Oh boy, did we,” Mousse chuckled.
I didn’t expect they would get it right. Our divorce wasn’t final yet. But as far as the news media was concerned, that was all over. This was a fight between the woman they were starting to call by her initials, and some crazy, angry former husband who couldn’t contain himself.
I turned off the TV and tried to pray. But it wasn’t happening. Maybe, in some small way, I didn’t think I deserved to have God listen to me.
And I thought of Nikki. I had dragged her into this thing. I needed to call her. But weird thoughts kept intruding. Like maybe my phone was tapped. I was going bughouse.
It was seven o’clock when I realized it was Wednesday. The Bible study at church. She’d be there. I could do this thing faceto-face, and maybe that way she’d be in a more forgiving mood.
And I needed to be around some people. So at 7:30 I was there.
Nikki wasn’t.
Which almost made me get up and get out. But Tom Starkey made a big deal out of welcoming me. He’d seen the news (who hadn’t?) and was full of concern. He convinced me to stay.
He got everybody together—the group was about fifty or sixty people—and we sat. Then he opened up with a prayer. When that was over, he asked how people were doing, if anybody had anything they wanted to share with the group. He looked at me, and when he did I thought everybody else was looking, too.
So I jumped in. “I just have a question.”
“Shoot,” Starkey said.
“About prayer.”
“Okay.”
“It says ask and you’ll receive?”
“Yes.”
“Where does it say that?”
“In the Sermon on the Mount.”
“Pretty big promise.”
“It is.”
“So how come I’ve been asking and not getting? What’s up with that?”
Tom Starkey nodded, like some sage from a hilltop in India. I got irritated. I know it was wrong. These were good people. Maybe I wanted to be irritated. It helped dull everything else. But I was also really interested in the answer.
“There are times when what we ask for may not be good for us,” Tom said. “We have to find out what that condition is.”
“Why?”
“Because God’s first concern isn’t to give us things. It’s to make us more like Christ.”
“I don’t want to be like Christ,” I said. “I just want some answers. Isn’t there something in the Bible about having faith, just a little bit, and you can throw a mountain into the ocean?”
“Yes.”
“So?”
“There is also this, from the book of 1 John. ‘This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.’”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means that God’s will comes first. Jesus even prayed a prayer that wasn’t answered with a yes.”
“Yeah?”
Tom flipped a few pages in his Bible and read. “‘“Father, if you are willing, take this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done.” An angel from heaven appeared to him and strengthened him. And being in anguish, he prayed more earnestly, and his sweat was like drops of blood falling to the ground.’”
“What’s this about a cup?”
“Jesus was praying that he wouldn’t have to go to the cross. The cup was figurative, meaning a cup of suffering.”
“So what was going on? He prayed not to be killed?”
“But he says to God, not my will, but yours. That’s the key to prayer. If it is not God’s will, it’s not good for us.”
“That’s very convenient.”
“How do you mean?”
“Well, you ask and it’s supposed to happen. If it doesn’t happen, you can say, oh, not God’s will. Sorry.”
“It also says, in 1 John . . .” Tom flipped more pages. The guy was good with pages. “‘Dear friends, if our hearts do not condemn us, we have confidence before God and receive from him anything we ask, because we obey his commands and do what pleases him.’ So there’s a condition there, about obedience. If we need to be taught something about what pleases God before our prayer requests are given to us, then we have to bite the bullet and learn that. Sometimes God has rough hands.”
I frowned.
“A potter’s hands are rough,” Starkey added, “from working with all that clay. Loving and rough at the same time.”
This time I shrugged. It wasn’t coming through loud and clear. Or maybe I didn’t want it to.
To Starkey’s credit he didn’t press me on this. The Bible study continued. I tried to listen but my mind was all over the place.
Until Nikki walked in. She took a chair on the opposite side of the circle. We locked eyes for a moment. I didn’t move. She nodded at me. If I was a nod reader, I would have read that as being shocked or dismayed. But I wasn’t, so I waited to see if she’d talk to me after the study was over.
She did. Walked across the room.
Her face was full of knowing and that much I
could
read.
“You look like you heard about it,” I said.
“My dad called me. It was on the news in San Diego.” “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.”
“I don’t want this to hurt your career.”
“Such as it is?”
“I mean it.”
“I’m not worried. What about you. How are you getting along?” I shrugged.
“I’m glad you’re here,” she said.
“Yeah, it’s fine. Everybody’s been great.”
“But?”
“There’s some things you just have to work out for yourself.” “I don’t believe that.”
I put my hands up. “Nikki, don’t tell me to pray or think about God right now. I know all that. I just—have to work it out.”
She nodded. Smiled. And that’s when I said, “Can you come outside a second?”
We went out into the night, near the same courtyard where a snake hired by Jennings had taken our picture. I didn’t care now if they had a video camera on.
“I want to see you again,” I said.
She looked at the ground, like this was bad news. “I knew you were going to say that.”
“How did you know?”
“Because I was thinking it, too.”
“I want to see you.”
“I know. But nothing’s changed.”
I put my hands on her shoulders, wanting to kiss her. “But how do you
feel?
“Mark, please don’t press this right now. Please.”
I hesitated a moment, feeling suspended in midair. Then took my hands down. “Okay.”
She breathed a sigh of relief. “Come on, let’s go back inside.”
“I need to go.”
“Mark—”
“Keep praying for me.”
No sleep.
There’s a scene in the old Dick Powell film noir,
Murder, My Sweet,
where Powell, playing detective Philip Marlowe, is drugged by the bad guys. Hopped up, as they used to say. He can’t see anything straight. The world is all webby and fuzzy and off-kilter. He starts to wonder if he’s ever going to see things straight again. And he’s alone.
That’s what I felt like. Alone and in a fuzz. Didn’t want to see anybody, talk to anybody.
Except one guy. And that became my obsession.
I drove over to Atlas Auto Body and walked into the first bay. Some guy with a shaved head and tattoo on the back of his neck— I think it was a fish or an eggplant—gave me a look.
“Ron Reid around?” I said.
“Not here,” Fish Neck said.
“When’s he coming back?”
“Never. If he does, I’ll wrap some cable around his neck.”
“I’d appreciate that.”
Fish Neck stared at me. “Who are you?”
“Somebody who wants real bad to talk to him.”
“You and me both. He left me doing double time.”
“You have any idea where he might’ve gone?”
“None. Wait. You’re his kid, right?”
“Yeah.”
“He talked about you.”
“Oh yeah?”
“Said he was gonna make some money off you.”
A white light flashed behind my eyes.
“Wasn’t he on parole or something?” Fish Neck said. I left without answering, drove immediately to the federal building downtown. Ron had been in on a federal rap, so this was the place to start looking for him, I guessed. I wasn’t going to tell them why I wanted to find him, of course. That was my business. But I could say I was his son and really needed to contact him. True.
My plan was all mucked up with red tape once I walked in. Guys in blue blazers with earphones gave me the twice-over even before I checked through the metal detectors. The suit at the front desk gave me a
Can I help you
that was larded with suspicion.
I explained my business as best I could. Long-lost son looking for paroled father and all that. The suit told me to wait and got on the phone. Then he told me someone would be right down.
That someone was a young-looking woman who introduced herself as Stephanie Wong, marshal. I got the immediate impression she was running interference for everybody else, maybe got the short straw when they said some guy looking for his father was downstairs.
I put my best face on. “My dad is on parole, I think he was in Terminal Island. I’m looking for him, but he’s gone. I’m wondering if he’s in trouble or something.” He
was
in trouble. With me.
“If he is under our jurisdiction,” Stephanie Wong said, “I’m afraid that information is not something we can give out.”
“Even to a family member?”
She looked at me, making me wonder if she believed me. “I’m afraid so.”
I wished she’d quit saying she was afraid.
“So there’s no way you can help me?”
“You could fill out a JN–30 form.”
“What’s that?”
“Request for confidential information. You’d have to provide a justification, and then the matter would be reviewed. It happens sometimes.”
“How often?”
Marshal Wong shook her head. “Not often.”
“So what do I do?”
“You really want to find your father?”
“Oh yeah.”
“Can I ask you why?”
I told myself to stay calm. “There are just some things I haven’t had a chance to say to him yet.”
“Have you thought about a private investigator?”
“No.”
“Sometimes they have resources and contacts. I can’t promise you anything and this is off the record, okay?”
“Sure.”
“That’s what I would do if I were you.”
I wanted to say
You can thank your lucky stars you’re not me.
I didn’t know any private investigators. It’s not like the movies, where you can find them in an office building, and some guy looking like Bogart comes out to help you. I didn’t know where to turn.