Red Light (47 page)

Sometimes I wish I could just fly away.

Don't you do it, she
thought. I can forgive anything but that.

■ • •

Brighton got there in the
early evening. He'd been reluctant to meet with her at her place, but she'd
talked him into it over the phone. He stood and looked at the chair where Mel
Glandis had sat just a few hours earlier. He didn't sit down. It was like his
instincts told him not to, Merci thought, like he knew it wasn't a chair you
got good news in.

Instead, Brighton
knelt down and extended a big hand to Tim, who tried to pull off his wedding
band.

"Cute boy,"
he said. "You're a cute boy, Tim, Jr. You look a little like Dad, a little
like Mom. That's a good combination."

She set a copy of Jim
O'Brien's suicide letter on the coffee table. Brighton looked up at her, rose
and picked up the envelope.

"Have
a seat while you read," she said.

"I'll stand." His eyes were wary in his lined,
tired face. "I talked to Mike again today. He's doing okay. He'll be back
to work in a week."

"I
haven't talked to him."

"So he said. I
think you might find him more forgiving than you believe. He
understands what happened. He understands how Evan fooled us all."

"Me
most of all."

"You. Me.
Gilliam. All of us. It happens. If it didn't, we wouldn’t have jobs."

"Some
job, isn't it?"

Brighton
pursed his lips and shrugged. "It beats selling shoes."

"Have
you heard anything from Paul?"

"He signed out
for a month. Something tells me he won't be coming back. Hot for San Diego
sheriffs, I think. I'm not surprised he has called you."

"Why
is that?"

"It's his way.
He doesn't complain. He doesn't explain. He just does what he does. When we
hired him from Santa Ana P.D. we knew he was a little touchy."

He looked at her,
then pulled the letter from the envelope. He read it slowly, looking up at her
twice. Then he slid the letter back into envelope.

"Interesting
words," he said.

"And
more of them, right here. Patti Bailey's."

She hit the play button on
her tape recorder and turned up the volume.

Man
:
"Whazzat?"

Woman
: "Zwhat?"

Man
:
"Clickin' sound."

Woman
: "My bubble gum." Chewing sounds.

"It
was actually the sound of Patti's tape recorder going on."

Brighton eyed her
sharply. Merci held up the key that O'Brien had sent her, courtesy of Mel
Glandis.

"Inland Storage,
Riverside," she said. "That's where your box of Bailey evidence got
to. After it disappeared from your unit at Security."

A look of
bewilderment crossed his face. She saw that Brighton couldn't understand who
had betrayed him. Because it was so much like what he himself had done to Bill
Owen thirty-two years back. She wondered if schemers were most easily
manipulated, if their cunning left a blind spot.

"Where'd
you get that?"

"It
doesn't matter right now. What I found in the box does."

"You
tape-recording this?"

"I don't have
to. You know what you're listening to right now. You've heard it. More than
once, I'd guess. Bailey and Meeks. Bailey and Bill Owen. Bailey and Jim
O'Brien. He shoots her in the back. You can hear her hit, hear him swear and
cry. You put him up to it. You and Big Pat. Just like the letter says."

Brighton was nodding
now, as if in agreement with some minor point of order. "Jim O'Brien's
dying words, thirty-two years after the fact, won't carry much weight in
court."

"They'd carry a
lot of weight on the front page of the
Times,
the
Register
or the
Journal."

"You
won't do that."

"Why
not?"

"You
don't get it, do you?"

"It's
all pretty much right here."

"No, Rayborn—the
consequences.
The consequences of you going to the media, or the Grand
Jury, or whatever you're thinking."

"I understand
that you'd be disgraced. Between the Bailey tape and O'Brien's letter, that's
evidence of conspiracy to commit murder, blackmail, obstruction of
justice."

"Sure.
You could ruin me, but what would it do to
you?”

"Nothing
good."

"Then
I don't understand. Why are you even thinking of this? It goes against your
department. It goes against your superiors. It goes again your friends and
supporters. You're going to bring down everybody around you. For what?
Why?"

"For Patti
Bailey. She's the one we were supposed to serve and protect. Remember?"

Brighton shook his
head, looking down at Tim. Then he scooped the boy and sat down by the window.
He bounced Tim gently on knee, his big weathered hands secure around Tim's soft
middle.

The boy looked up at
Merci and smiled, proud to be riding, proud be on the lap of a big strong man.

"Let me set up a
couple of scenarios for you, Merci. One: You expose all this to solve a
thirty-two-year-old homicide case—fine. I'm deposed and Mel Glandis steps in as
interim sheriff. Pat McNally goes down the drain. The men and women in the
department look on you as a vulture---the detective who accused her own
boyfriend of murder, the detective who dusted off an irrelevant case from three
decades ago and made everyone suffer for her ideals. You'd be vapor. You'd be
gone. They'd haze right into the smog. So, you play the child and everyone gets
hurt. Including you. Tim here—you'd be bringing him into a world that despises
his mother. Nice. Great. Just how I'd want to raise my son."

Tim
still bounced happily on Brighton's knee.

"Okay, here's
scenario number two. You compromise with youself, just a little. You know the
truth about Bailey, you can let it out any time you want. It's not going away.
O'Brien killed her—not me or Pat or body else. In your heart the case is
solved, and there's no killer on the streets to do it again. Bailey's never
coming back, no matter which way you play it. That's what you pay. Now, what do
you get? You get whatever you want. Head of Homicide Detail, then Crimes
Against Persons Section? Take it. A shot at my office a few years down the
line? Take it. I'll back you with every ounce of my power and gratitude. You'd
have a department that's with you instead of against you. You'd have a world
that likes the sight of your face. You'd have a way to bring up this guy with
some advantages. And you can keep Clark out of it."

She felt the blood
rise to her face, the quiet acceleration of her heartbeat. "What's to
leave out?"

Brighton sighed, held
Tim up for a face-to-face. "Tim, your grandfather paid for the storage of
the Bailey evidence for ten years. Twenty-eight dollars a month, cash. He
helped me, Tim. He helped an old friend stay above the bullshit that we all
have to live with every day. That's what we cops do. Anyway, Tim, you can
figure your old grandpa into the conspiracy, if that's what you want to do.
He's part of it. It would come out and he'd suffer. But he did the right thing.
He understood the difference between being a child, like you, and being a
man."

Brighton looked at
Merci, his eyes sharp and cold. "Jim killed that girl to protect himself
and his friends. We covered it up for the good of the department, Sergeant. We
covered it up to help get me where I needed to go. To help Frank Stills onto
the Board of Supervisors. To keep the county clean. To make it a good place to
live. To bring up kids like this one."

"Don't blame my
son for your crimes, Brighton. That sickens me. It's all disposable with you,
isn't it? Disposable law. Disposable friends. Disposable women. Who did Meeks
and Owen get to beat up Jesse Acuna?"

"Some young L.A.
cops. We learned of the arrangement through the tapes, used it to get a
substation we needed badly. That was part of the deal when Stills stepped up
and Meeks stepped down. What's it matter now?"

Brighton stood, Tim
still between his hands. He held out the infant and Merci took him.

"Do the right
thing for this little guy. He'll never thank you. He'll never know. But you
will. Welcome to the world, Rayborn. Rough place. Every once in a while, you
get a chance to do something good. Take it."

He touched Tim's
cheek, looked at Merci without expression, then walked out.

Merci walked the little
cottage with her heart pounding hard and a dark sleepiness hanging over her.
She called Zamorra for the third time that day—just his message machine at
home. She managed to get a home phone number for Janine's parents. They talked
a while. They said Paul had spoken highly of her. They hadn't heard from or
seen him since they buried their daughter. That was over a week ago. He'd
looked terrible that day, eyes looking past everybody and everything for
something they couldn't find. He said something about getting away for a while.

• • •

She got to Mike's place
just before seven, sat in the car until she saw him open the front door. The
dogs barked and bayed. The night moonless and cold and the stars looked too far
away to matter.

Mike stood in the
doorway. The house light behind him seemed the only light in Modjeska Canyon,
the only light left in the world. Tim was in his car seat, head to the side and
a little forward, shoulder straps secure, like a tiny parachutist on his way
down.

She climbed out of
the Impala, pain biting her side as she stood walked up the stepping-stones
toward the door. She stopped halfway.

"Hello,
Mike," she said. It was cold enough that her breath condensed in the night
air. She could see the faint clouds as she breathed.

"Hi,
Merci."

She had already
decided not to go in, but it hurt and angered her he didn't ask her.

"I'm sorry for
what I did. I made a bad call, a real bad one. I never made a worse one. Well,
maybe that's not true."

She heard her voice
catch and she felt the hot tears running down cheeks but she wouldn't crack. It
was crucial that she not, for reasons she could not have explained.

"But I'm sorry
Mike. I just... I just can't tell you how sorry I am to have put you through
all that. I wish so bad there was a way to take it back, not do what I
did."

His features were
hard to make out with the light behind him. Maybe he wanted it that way.

"I
accept your apology," he said quietly.

"And I . . . you
know I really cared about you, Mike. I cared about you more than anybody but
Tim, Jr., and Dad, but I was always just . . . so . . . shitty at it. I
couldn't get over Hess and I took it out on you and nothing made sense after a
while. But you were a good friend and a lover and
I...
I didn't ever intend to hurt you like I did."

"I
know."

She
wanted to tell him she loved him, but she knew she did not love him and had
never loved him in the way that she had wanted to. They were the wrong words.
They were words for a time that hadn't happened yet, and maybe would never
happen.

"Forgive
me."

Mike
said nothing for a long minute. "All right."

"I mean
genuinely forgive me? If I kneel down in front of you and look up and ask you
to forgive me will you touch my head and forgive me?"

He seemed about to
speak but didn't. She walked the rest of the way to the door and knelt down on
the cold hard porch in front of him. The wound in her side jumped with pain and
her leg felt hot and stiff. When she looked up she still couldn't see the
expression on his face.

"Forgive
me."

She
watched the vapor come from his nose.

"You sold me
cheap, Merci. The worst of it all is that after everything I am and everything
I tried to be, you believed the worst about me. You believed I'd kill that
girl."

"Forgive
me for that, too."

He
shut the door and locked it.

Then she heard the
car pull in behind her, saw the face of the house bathed by headlights. She
struggled up slowly, got her balance, turned and squinted. The lights went out
and a door opened.

A
moment later Lynda Coiner walked toward her. "I'm sorry," Coiner
said. Then she hustled past Merci like someone trying to get out of the rain.
The door opened up to receive her, then shut again. Merci heard the dead bolt
slide into place.

L
ater that night she sat by the fire with her father,
up close to get warmth into her aching bones. Another storm front had swung
down from the north and the rain came fast and hard against the roof.

Clark was stretched
into his favorite recliner, his long body not quite comfortable in its
contours, his hands folded across his lap and flames flickering in his glasses.