Breach of Promise (29 page)

Even now I can’t remember exactly how I managed to get in. My mind was like a volcano, one thought flowing into the next, a hot mess. I half remember charging through the gate and running past a man who was staggering near the pool. He may even have said something to me.

But everything came into focus when I opened the big white door and found myself standing in the same room with Paula and Troncatti.

I still had my expensive night scope around my neck. It kept thunking against my chest, stopping only when I did, a few feet from the happy couple.

Troncatti was speechless, his eyes filling with rage. Paula was in shock. “Mark!”
Before I could say anything, Igor charged into the room. We

made eye contact, and I reveled in his look. It was outraged, no doubt because I had managed to get into physical proximity with Troncatti.

“It’s all right, Farid.” Troncatti waved his hand at Igor. “Leave him with us.”
Igor looked almost injured, and he backed out of the room very reluctantly.
“Time we had a talk,” Troncatti said. “One talk. You understand?” The last word sounded like
unnerstanna.
I looked at Paula, who was now strangely silent. I say
strangely
because she was never one to back down—on screen or in real life. My nerves were crackling. For a moment we all stood there, like we were holding guns on each other.
Then Troncatti walked in a big semicircle around the room, looking at me, like he was sizing up a shot in one of his movies.
“You are not a pleasant man,” he finally said. “Things go so much better if you are a pleasant one.”
“You need a new writer,” I said.
“You are in a lot of trouble, being here.”
I looked over at Paula. “Am I in trouble?”
“You shouldn’t have come here,” she said.
“You are talking to me,” Troncatti said. “Leave her out.”
“You want to be left out, Paula?”
“Over here!” Troncatti hit his chest.
Paula looked a little scared. That made me angry. “I want to see my daughter.”
Troncatti shook his head. “That has been decided already.” “You two can let me.”
“No way,” Troncatti said.
“I’m no threat to her. Paula, you know that.”
“You shouldn’t have come,” she said.
“Why are you turning her against me? Why are you making up lies about abuse? What did I do, Paula?”
She didn’t answer.
“There is no reason with you,” Troncatti said. “I will call the police you don’t get out.”
I wasn’t afraid of him. Foolish, yes. But there was nothing more anybody could do to me. I didn’t care what happened. All I wanted was to say my piece to Paula. Even as Troncatti fished for his cell phone, I didn’t move.
“He tell you what he did?” I said.
Paula was still silent, but this time she frowned.
“Or were you in on it?”
No answer. Troncatti was barking into his phone.
“You know about the part I was supposed to get?” I didn’t take my eyes off Paula’s. I didn’t just see the beauty in them, I saw something else. A darkness. Like somebody had just shut off the lights.
“I was all set to get a lead on a new show at NBC.” My voice was calm but strong. “They wanted me. They picked me. It was going to make me a star. And your lover had his agent get hold of the producer and ax me. He did that. Did you know?”
I couldn’t tell from her face and dark eyes what she knew. All I knew was she was listening. But that wasn’t enough for me. I took a step closer. “Did you know?”
There was a flicker in the eyes, like she might want to say something.
“Did you?” I was feeling tears stinging my eyes. “And you went along with it?”
We looked at each other. Her lower lip quivered a little, like there was a heavy word teetering on the edge.
And then Igor was back, grabbing me by the shirt.
“Farid will take you outside to wait for the police,” Troncatti said.
I tried to jerk away, but the limo-driver–bodyguard held me fast. I was considering what to do next when I sensed someone else in the room.
Maddie.
She was standing on the upper level, looking down into the room. She had a robe on and her big eyes stared at us, like we were hyenas at the zoo.
“Maddie!” I screamed.
She turned quickly and ran away.
“Maddie!”
“Shut up,” Troncatti said.
I put everything I could into an elbow to Igor’s midsection. It was rock hard. But it got me loose for a split second.
I ran toward the stairs yelling, “Maddie! Maddie!”
I made it to the first step when my feet went out. Igor had me by the legs. My head thudded against the banister and my chest detonated in pain as I fell on the stairs with my scope under me.
For good measure, Igor let me have a fist to the left eye. Red opened up on my mind’s screen like a special effect from a World War II movie. My head shot back to the hard edge of a step.
“Stop it!” Paula’s voice came from across the room. “Let him go.”
“Shut up!” Troncatti spouted.
“Just let him go,” Paula pleaded.
“Farid, get him to the gate. Wait for the police.”
As I was jerked to my feet, my head buzzing, I heard Paula say
Please
and Troncatti say
Shut up
again. What was left in me wanted to run over and grab the guy by the neck for talking to her like that, but what was left in me wasn’t too strong. Igor had no trouble getting me out into the night.
“You try to run,” he said, “I will break all your fingers.”

“You want to tell me what you expected to do there?” the cop asked. He was a uniform, a sergeant, and we sat at his desk at the Santa Monica station. They’d given me Insta-Ice for the side of my face, which felt like a football after the extra point.

“Not particularly,” I said.
“You want to be difficult?”
“Aren’t you supposed to read me my Miranda rights or something?”

“You watch too much TV.”
“What if I want a lawyer?”
“Do you?”
“No.”
“Then why don’t you tell me what you were doing in Troncatti’s

house.”
“Trying to stop him from hitting my wife.”
“You were trespassing.”
The officer’s name was Ruchlis. I wondered if he was a reasonable man.

He looked at me a little disappointed. “We’re here to talk about you, not me.”
“Look, I’m sorry I was on that scum’s property. I didn’t damage anything. In fact I’m the one with the black eye. But I’m not a criminal.”
“What are you, Mr. Gillen?”
“Just a guy who’s . . .”
“Go ahead.” He seemed to want to listen.
“I just wanted to help her.”
“Who?”
“My wife. And my daughter was in there, too.”
“Is this a custody thing?”
“Yeah.”
“You’re supposed to go to court for that. You take things in your own hands it ends bad.”
“It can’t get any worse.”
Another uniform walked over to the desk. “I need you for a second,” he said.
“Just sit here,” Ruchlis told me. He got up and walked a few steps away from the desk. I watched them talk and knew it had to do with me. Ruchlis looked over at me a couple of times while the other cop talked to him.
When he came back to the desk he sat down, looking almost upset. “You’d better call that lawyer after all,” he said.

The Men’s Central Jail in LA is not the place to plan a vacation. It’s meat storage, a holding pen for as many accused as they can stuff into it. That results in more than a few disturbances among the inmates. But there’s also a marketplace. Drugs are sold, deals made, even lives are occasionally traded.

I was booked, showered, garbed, and given a cell. It was the weekend, so I got to sit there for two days, waiting until Monday to go before a judge.

I did get my one phone call, and used it for Alex. She said she’d show up for the arraignment and bail hearing. But she did not sound happy about it. I couldn’t blame her. It wasn’t bad enough having a client who had permanent foot-in-mouth disease. Now he was a criminal.

I got the shakes getting shown to a cell. They got a little worse when I met my cell mate, a very large person named Ignacio. He had muscles in places where I don’t even have places, and a face that had been on the business end of more than one fight. He told me he was in for beating up a guy in a bar who had dissed the Oakland Raiders, Ignacio’s favorite team.

I decided to leave football out of our conversations. And we did have conversations. Or rather, Ignacio did. He loved to talk. He gave me an earful, especially when he found out why I was here.

“Trespass? You in here for that? Man, you getting the
dedo grande.
”
When I told him about Maddie, Ignacio actually got kind of brotherly. He said he had a daughter too, with his girlfriend. The girl’s family took her back to Mexico to keep her away from Ignacio. Maybe just as well, he said, until he learned how to keep from hurting people who ticked him off.
“Got to get rid of the hate, man.” Ignacio shook his very large head. “If I got hate, I use it. Got to get rid of it. So how’d you lose your daughter?”
Nervously, but then warming up, I gave him the story, warts and all, and he gave me another earful. “Man, you are stupid. You know how stupid you are? If there was a school for stupid people, you’d be the teacher, man.”
I let him have his opinion.
“You let the system beat you up. You got to know how to play it.” He went on to tell me all about how to beat an assault rap. Maybe that would come in handy if I ever came face-to-face with Troncatti.
That night I didn’t get much sleep. There was a lot of noise in there, but mostly I couldn’t sleep because I kept thinking about Maddie and Paula. And Troncatti.
And a lot about what Ignacio had said about hate.
Got to get rid of it.

I woke up on Sunday with Ignacio talking to himself. Actually, I think he was singing, something about birds and guns. And he kept it up even while we were walking in the long line toward what they call breakfast in this place.

“You stay with me,” Ignacio said. “I don’t want you hurt.” That was a relief.
I was halfway through cold eggs and limp toast when they made

the announcement that if anybody wanted to talk to a chaplain— and they had different kinds for different religious preferences— then you could sign up. And, after breakfast, I did.

Maybe I was halfway curious what a jail chaplain would have to say to somebody like me. Maybe I really wanted to hear some words of wisdom. Or maybe I just wanted to be relieved of Ignacio’s rat-a-tat talk for a while.

Whatever the real reason, I was glad to get out of the cell and walked by a deputy down to an interview room. Inside I saw another inmate, only this one was dressed in civvies. I wondered how he’d gotten those clothes.

He was the Christian chaplain? He was a muscular Latino, had a tattoo on his forearm and a shaved head.
“You’re not the type we usually get in here,” he said. “Mostly they look like me.”
“How did you ...?”
He smiled. One of his front teeth was gold. “You believe a sweet face like this used to bust heads? When I got saved, I told God I was gonna do whatever it took to get back in here and talk to my people. Ten years ago. And now I’m talking. But like I said, you don’t look like the type. So why don’t you tell me how you find yourself in this place?”
For the second time in two days, the first being with my roommate in the cell, I told the story—of me and Paula and Maddie, of Troncatti, and everything I did about it. I sounded even more stupid this time around. I was glad Ignacio wasn’t here. When I finished, I asked the chaplain, “So how stupid do you think I am?”
He shrugged. “About as stupid as David. Dude couldn’t keep his eyes off the pretty girls. Brings one into the palace, gets her pregnant, tries to cover it up by killing her husband. And the guy is one of the heroes of the Bible. If God didn’t use stupid people, he’d have a pretty tough choice about finding anybody.”
“But I made a real mess of things, I mean, bad.”
“Yeah, you did. Only question now is what’re you gonna do about it?”
“What do you think I should do?”
“You told me you were going to a Bible study and church. What happened to that?”
“I tried it with God. I even prayed that he’d let me have my daughter. It didn’t work out.”
“So you walk away? Listen, you don’t
try it
with God, like he’s some cafeteria line and you don’t get the dessert you wanted so you don’t come back to the place. You got to grab hold with everything, like your life depends on it, which it does.”
“But what does that even mean? I poured out my heart to God and got hammered.”
“Pouring out your heart is a good thing, but it’s not the only thing. It’s not the place you stop. It’s the place you start. You move on to where God wants you to be, which is in Jesus Christ.”
“What do you mean,
in?
”
“It’s what the Bible says. Listen.” He reached for his leather Bible—which was as worn as any book I’ve ever seen with the cover still on—and flipped through it. I could see the pages marked up with different colored inks and highlighter pens. Every page was like a child’s rainbow.
“‘Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; the old has gone, the new has come!’ You see that?
In Christ.
I remembered that passage. Pastor Scott had used it in one of his sermons. Was this a telegram from God?
“Not outside,” Chaplain Ray continued, “not looking in, not messing around, but making the big dive with your whole life into Christ. You give it up for him, and you don’t look back, you don’t keep things to yourself, you don’t make it halfway. You spill out everything and admit that you can’t make it on your own and that you want Jesus to be making it for you, and you don’t mess around with sin anymore, which means trying to have everything your own way all the time and running around hating everybody, like your mother-in-law and this Italian dude. You make a decision and you ask Jesus to forgive you and make you right. And if you want to know how to do it, take a look at Psalm 51, which is the one David wrote after he murdered the guy and took his wife. And if you can say those words and mean them then you’re going to be home free, understanding that Jesus is the one who died in your place on the cross.”
“Whoa.”
“I can keep talking, man. I’m just getting warmed up. But I don’t want to talk to the wall. I want to know if you’re gonna do anything about this.”
My last line of defense flew up like a ragged cobweb. “I haven’t got a Bible.”
He reached for his coat, which was laid across a chair, and pulled out a brand new hand-sized Bible. “Now you do. Want to walk through it with me? I got time.”
“I guess I’m not going anywhere, either.”
I don’t know how to explain what happened next. After we read a bunch of the Bible together, all of a sudden Chaplain Ray was praying over me and with me and I was praying to Jesus and it felt like a washing of my body, inside and out. And when we were done, I was still in jail, still in the jailhouse jumpsuit, I still didn’t have Maddie, I still had a string of stupid things behind me—but I felt like there was a hand on me pulling me up from where I was to where I had to be.
Ray said, “When you get out of here, I want you to get your rear back in church. Got that?”
I nodded.
“You trust God. For everything. Your daughter. Your life. You ask him what to do. You get your face in the Bible. You trust God. You hearing me?”
“I’ll try.”
“No, man. You do it. I don’t want to hear no excuse.”
After all the ways I’d messed up, I knew I was full of excuses. And I knew the people I cared about, and who cared about me, could look at this and see only a thin jailhouse conversion.
But the trust thing hit me hardest. Chaplain Ray was right. I had to trust God this time, all the way, no matter what people thought.
And that’s the way it was going to be, for Maddie’s sake.