China Lake (2 page)

A snub-nosed woman jutted forward from the crowd. ‘‘Slut lovers! Queer lovers! Take your mumbo jumbo back to Haiti!’’

Mourners deliberately looked past the protesters. We were a mixed bag—academics rumpled in grief, Claudine’s Caribbean family, and friends like me, with my Celtic looks, middle-class manners, and bitten-back shock. My own religion was a subterranean Catholicism that welled up for deaths and holidays. God-as-stink-bomb was a novelty to me. I felt myself fraying, but for Nikki’s sake I kept walking, looking into the distance where the October air shimmered over the Santa Ynez mountains.

Peeved that we weren’t responding to them, a crew-cut young man with acne pointed at Nikki. ‘‘We’re talking to you, witch girl.’’

That blew it. Nikki’s husband, Carl, who had the heart and temper of an accountant, turned toward him. ‘‘How dare you?’’ His hand was raised, index finger pointing. ‘‘How dare you speak that way to my wife?’’

Peter Wyoming said, ‘‘Wife? You mean your ho?’’

His followers laughed. They laughed and cheered and shook their picket signs.

Carl’s owlish glasses were askew on his face. ‘‘Bastards! You call yourselves Christians? Shame on you.’’

Wyoming blinked with lizard quickness. His eyes were pale blue and looking at Nikki. ‘‘The Lord says, ‘Your shame will be seen. I have seen your abominations, your adulteries and neighings, your lewd harlotries.’ ’’

Carl’s muscles bunched beneath his pinstripes. Nikki said, ‘‘Don’t,’’ but he stepped toward Wyoming. She glanced at me. ‘‘Evan—’’

We grabbed his arms. He was two feet from Wyoming, cocking his elbow to throw a punch I knew I couldn’t stop.

Then I heard Nikki’s voice, close to his ear, speaking coolly and loud enough for Wyoming to hear. ‘‘He’s an inbred, low-wattage, mouth-breathing redneck. He’s not worth it.’’

The impertinent dignity of her outrage held Carl back. His arm dropped and he turned to her. So he didn’t see the smirk on Wyoming’s face, the disdain that meant: No real man lets two women restrain him.

Wyoming said loudly, ‘‘You think Claudine was great, always promoting ‘compassion’ and ‘cure’ and ‘education.’ Those are just fancy excuses for whoring.’’

Ahead, the pallbearers slid the casket into the gaping embrace of the hearse. Nikki watched, her fingers clenched. I nudged Carl forward, tipping my head toward the reporters and saying, ‘‘All they’d notice is that you threw the first punch.’’

‘‘ ‘Be wretched and mourn and weep,’ ’’ Wyoming intoned. ‘‘ ‘Humble yourselves before the Lord and he will exalt you.’ ’’

The words struck and bruised: scripture as covering fire. Forget it. I was through holding back. ‘‘I just figured out your problem. You confuse humility with humiliation.’’

Crew-cut said, ‘‘Big words don’t trick us. You’ll burn in hell.’’

Nikki was biting her lip, walking at a heavy, pregnant pace, fighting not to cry in front of these people. Carl held his arm tight around her.

‘‘Slut!’’ Crew-cut shouted as an afterthought, or maybe just punctuation.

I turned to face him. ‘‘Why is it that people with tiny brains always come out with that same, tired insult? Can’t your skulls fit in even a slender second thought?’’

His acne flamed. Before he could answer I spun around. Carl was holding the door of their car for Nikki, waiting for her to lumber in before slamming it. As he walked around to the driver’s side, I saw the look on her face. It was brittle, and rupturing.

She was staring at the windshield, where a flyer had been stuck under the wipers. I hurriedly pulled it out. In lurid red print it said, YOUR NEXT. Beneath the words was a comic strip titled, ‘‘AIDS: God’s Roach Ho-tel.’’ The cartoons showed Hollywood street tarts scratching at open sores, with the tagline,
Ho’s check in—but they don’t check out!
The drawings were gruesome and irritatingly professional. At the bottom of the page was a cheery note from the Remnant:
Visit us on the World Wide Web!

Carl started his engine. Other mourners were yanking the flyers off their windshields, shaking their heads, crumpling them. Behind me, reporters were calling to Wyoming, clamoring for his attention. The hearse pulled away and Carl followed, heading up a somber procession, accompanying Claudine on her last journey.

Wyoming’s dry, deep voice rose above the background noise. He was speaking to a television reporter, leaning into the microphone, sounding aggrieved. To let him have the last word here seemed intolerable. I began walking toward him.

I heard him say he didn’t hate sick people—God did, and the Remnant was just stating that fact. The reporter leaned forward assertively, cocking his head to demonstrate attentive skepticism, asking Wyoming if he thought he had converted the people who attended the funeral.

‘‘No, and I don’t care one bit. ‘Let the filthy still be filthy, and the righteous still do right.’ ’’

‘‘Excuse me,’’ I said.

Wyoming, his followers, and the reporter looked at me. I said, ‘‘ ‘Blessed are they who mourn, for they shall be comforted.’ ’’ It was the first Bible quote I could think of, Gospel of Matthew, and fortunately it was apt.

Wyoming looked amused. His expression said,
Come on, swap chapter and verse with me; you’ll end up as my chew toy.
The reporter pushed his sunglasses up his nose and twitched his mustache, not sure whether this interruption would make good airplay.

‘‘ ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall be shown mercy,’ ’’ I said. ‘‘I just wanted you to remember that, Mr. Wyoming.’’

He surveyed me with a stare that started at my feet, rode up my legs, and seemed to slide under my skirt and blouse. He appeared unimpressed by what folks called my tomboy figure—the sprinter’s legs, spartan chest, short, mussy hair the color of toffee. Still, by the time his eyes reached my face I felt flushed.

The reporter said, ‘‘You seem upset about Pastor Wyoming’s presence, Miss . . .’’

‘‘Delaney. Evan Delaney.’’

The cameraman swiveled to spot me in the lens of his minicam, but Wyoming jumped in. ‘‘Miss Delaney thinks I’m cruel, but Claudine Girard sent people to hell. Giving her a Christian funeral like a clean, decent woman is obscene.’’

The reporter turned to me. ‘‘How do you feel about that?’’

I gestured at Wyoming and his people. ‘‘I think we’re looking at the dictionary definition of ‘obscene,’ right here.’’

‘‘Will you listen to that?’’ Wyoming said. ‘‘She up and claims she’s an expert on obscenity. Like that’s something to be proud of.’’

They each had a script:
Snappy Fundamentalist Sound Bites
and
Lights, Camera, Emotion!
I was irrelevant. Wearily I held up the flyer and said, ‘‘Tell your cartoonist that ‘millennium’ is spelled with two Ns.’’

Sometimes I am too clever for my own good. The hip-shot quip can ricochet. As I walked away, Wyoming said, ‘‘Delaney, you said your name was? Tell the cartoonist yourself. You’re related to her.’’

I couldn’t help it—I stopped dead and stared at the flyer. The grim and flashy cartoons suddenly looked familiar. It was the style, a cross between
Spider-Man
and
Xena, Warrior Princess
. I flipped to the back page, the final drawing, where she would sign it.

Damn. In tiny letters,
Tabitha Delaney
. My brother’s wife.

Blessed are the meek, for they keep their mouths shut in front of TV crews.

At the graveside service Nikki stood as still as an icon, holding us, motionless and moved, straight through ‘‘Amen.’’ But inside I was guttering with anger. Tabitha Delaney. The name flared before me like a lighted match. I left the cemetery hastily, with few words to the other mourners.

I headed to the Santa Barbara County Courthouse. Not because I needed a lawyer—I was a lawyer myself, though I had quit practicing to become a legal researcher and journalist, a pen for hire. I had also published a couple of novels, even had my new one,
Lithium Sunset
, in local bookstores. Tabitha’s actions, however, had led me to put my fiction writing into suspended animation. I headed to the courthouse because I needed to talk, and not to Nikki.

I walked along the tiled hallway, scanning the judges’ names painted in calligraphy script on the wall outside each courtroom. The building abounds with such calculated quaintness. I half expected to see horses tied to a hitching post on the lush lawn, and Spanish dons strolling the grounds in silver-spurred boots.

When I slipped into Judge Rodriguez’s courtroom, trial was in session. A young woman sat on the witness stand, glaring at the attorney who was cross-examining her. The court reporter’s typewriter clicked softly. At the defense table, Jesse Blackburn asked the next question.

‘‘You entered the premises that night without permission, didn’t you?’’

‘‘Nobody told me I couldn’t.’’ Beneath the high ceiling the witness appeared puny, her clothes and face beige and grim. Almost as grim as the Remnant protesters.

I slouched in my seat, hearing the flyer rustle in my pocket. It sounded like the noise of approaching disruption. If Tabitha was drawing artwork for the Remnant, she was nearby. She was
back
.

How was I going to tell my brother? How was I going to tell his little boy?

Jesse said, ‘‘Let me rephrase. Nobody gave you permission to duplicate a key and use it to enter the bookstore after closing, did they?’’

‘‘No,’’ the woman admitted. ‘‘But I was taking my own initiative.’’

‘‘Initiative isn’t all you took, is it, Miss Gaul?’’

Jesse leaned forward, his cannonball shoulders shifting beneath his jacket. He was the one I came to see, and he looked grave and handsome, with the afternoon light burnishing his dark hair and glinting off the earring he wore, even to court.

‘‘While you worked at the bookstore you took numerous items without paying for them, didn’t you?’’ he said. ‘‘I don’t mean Beowulf’s bookmarks, or sugar packets from the coffee bar. You gave yourself a five-finger discount on the
New York Times
Best Seller List.’’

The plaintiff’s attorney stood up. ‘‘Objection. Assuming facts not in evidence.’’

Judge Sophia Rodriguez peered over her half-glasses at him. ‘‘Overruled.’’

Jesse took his time. Caution came unnaturally to him, but this was a big trial and he wanted to pitch a perfect game—no runs, no hits, no errors. And no easy feat. Priscilla Gaul’s long-term thievery had ended disastrously on the night that the owner of Beowulf’s Books decided to defend the store. Gaul had suffered what her attorney called ‘‘heinous and injurious bodily harm.’’ That was why she was suing the bookstore for damages, and that was why Jesse’s cocounsel wanted him to cross-examine her, though Jesse was a courtroom greenhorn, only twenty-seven years old. Fight hard luck with hard luck, and let him be the one to throw fastballs at her, low and inside.

Counting items on his fingers, he said, ‘‘An espresso maker, a thousand dollars in cash, and the collected works of Jackie Collins . . . do you deny that on the night of the incident you had those items in hand?’’

Bad choice of words. Her face bunched. ‘‘You’re doing it on purpose, talking about it like this. I know it.’’

‘‘Yes, I am. After all, it’s the reason you’re suing my client.’’

He was always more canny than I expected, always a surprise, which was why he could both entrance and infuriate me. Shove the witness off balance, toss the issues into the open, armed and ticking. That was Jesse.

Gaul said, ‘‘I had my flashlight. I took it to the bookstore that night to check that there hadn’t been another burglary. That’s all I had ‘in hand,’ nothing else.’’

In fact, she had been holding several ounces of hamburger. Ground sirloin, according to the pathology report. But he let her assertion pass, because Gaul began rubbing her left arm to remind the jury what she meant by
nothing
: that she no longer had a left hand. She had been mauled by attack animals when she reached behind a counter to unplug the espresso maker. That was the reason she was suing Beowulf’s Books for nine million dollars.

He said, ‘‘And you fled the bookstore because . . . ?’’

‘‘Those
things
were going to rip my throat out. They were wild; I thought they were a pack on the loose, prowling around town—’’

‘‘Drinking espresso?’’

Up popped her attorney. His name was Skip Hinkel, and he wore a suit as blond and tightly cut as his hair. He said, ‘‘Objection,’’ but Judge Rodriguez gestured him down, telling Jesse, ‘‘Skip the commentary, Mr. Blackburn.’’

Jesse said, ‘‘And after you fled Beowulf’s, did you contact the police?’’

‘‘No.’’

‘‘Did you contact Animal Control?’’

‘‘No.’’

‘‘Did you contact the owner of Beowulf’s, to inform her that animals were loose in the bookstore?’’

‘‘No.’’

‘‘Did you do anything besides hide in your apartment, buying jewelry from QVC until the infection to your hand got out of control?’’

‘‘I hid because I was traumatized! I had just been mauled by ferrets!’’

And that, in a nutshell, was Jesse’s problem— because California law restricted the possession of ferrets. Gaul’s attackers, the beloved pets of the eccentric woman who owned Beowulf’s, had been brought into the state illegally. They were contraband. And, worse for the defense, they were fugitives. To prevent their seizure the owner had spirited them into hiding. They were on the lam from the Department of Fish and Game, outlaw vigilantes of the genus
Mustela
.

‘‘I have nightmares about it.’’ Gaul said. ‘‘I see their little eyes and icky paws, scratching and flailing . . .’’ Her fingers made tiny, frenzied clawing motions.

Jesse merely watched her. ‘‘Is that why you put Valium in the hamburger? To calm them down?’’

‘‘Objection!’’ Hinkel’s hands were in the air— outrage in action, a drama school pose. ‘‘He’s harassing the witness.’’

Rodriguez gave him a gaze like lemon juice. ‘‘Asking relevant questions is not harassment. Sit down.’’