The First Cut (17 page)

Vining wasn’t thrilled about interacting with the San Rafael wife. Her prejudice was firmly in place. She saw the neighborhood as twisted traditional. Soon, the men would be home from the office for cocktails with their wives, who would lament about having too few hours in the day.

The twist, in Vining’s view, was that these women never did anything resembling real work. They spent their days exercising at the gym, shopping, gossiping, planning vacations at high-end resorts, and consuming the services of exotic personal care professionals: aestheticians, herbalists, acupuncturists, and Pilates instructors. They arrived home to say good-bye to the nannies who watched their kids and housekeepers who kept their homes shipshape. It was a perversion of women’s lib. These women were free to self-indulge.

She knew about their lives. She eavesdropped on them at Starbucks, the town square of the new millennium, while they stood in line with yoga mats slung over their shoulders, splurging on shared crumble cake and chatting about the events of their lives with the gravity of a U.N. Security Council meeting.

Sure, she had a well-developed attitude. She blamed her ex-husband Wes’s wife of seven years for it. It had taken Kaitlyn just over twenty-four months to evolve from stylist at Supercuts, where she’d started her affair with still-married Wes, to über–soccer mom. Kaitlyn’s upbringing had been as blue-collar as Vining’s, but she now affected that snobbery unique to those whose lives had transcended from hardscrabble to highbrow by the power vested in a wedding ring.

Vining had struggled most of her life to get by. The exception was the two years after Emily was born. Then Wes’s business was finally doing well and Vining had experienced what it was like not to go to an outside job every day. Not to struggle to make ends meet. Not to fret about how she should have paid the telephone bill instead of having dinner out. She had been taken care of and it had been nice.

Vining refused to put her daughter through the childhood she had endured. She and her younger sister, Stephanie, had never known their fathers, who had both left when they were toddlers. All their mother would say about her first two husbands was that they were bums and it was good that they weren’t in their lives. After school, the two girls would hang out at their grandmother’s home beauty salon while their mother was at work or on a date. Patsy married twice more. By the time husband number four, Mr. Brightly, had come around, Vining was married herself to her high school sweetheart, right after graduation. It was her ticket out of Dodge. A year later, she was pregnant and never happier.

She and Wes decided she would quit her job in the billing office of a dermatology group and stay home with Emily. Vining worked part-time managing Wes’s property development business. Through Wes’s hard work, he had become an in-demand general contractor and was initiating his own projects. He’d done well on the fixer-uppers he’d turned around and was building houses on spec. They’d just bought their first house, an early-sixties tract home suspended from a cliff on cantilevers, in the then-unfashionable L.A. neighborhood of Mt. Washington. Wes was rehabbing it himself on weekends. Vining considered getting her real estate license and capitalizing on the rebound of the California real estate market. They were living the American dream.

Vining loved those first years after Emily was born. She was finally in control of her life. She had a family and a good man who loved her. Wes was so easygoing. They never fought. Their lives were free of the relentless tension and energetic arguments that characterized her mother’s marriages. Life was great for the first time in Vining’s memory, until the day shortly after Emily turned two. Wes had come home and said he didn’t want to be married anymore. He piled clothes into his pickup truck and left.

Vining found a job as a civilian jailer at the PPD. Emily stayed with her mother or grandmother while Vining eked out a living. Wes paid child support, but Vining still struggled to make ends meet. She applied for a better-paying job as a police officer and surprised herself by making it through the Academy. Five years after Wes walked out on Vining, they finally divorced and he married Kaitlyn, eight years his junior. They bought a five-thousand-square-foot house in a spanking new development thirty miles away in the quiet and safe city of Calabasas, snuggled among the rugged hills east of Malibu. There, Kaitlyn was a stay-at-home mom with her two boys: Kyle, five; and Kelsey, three.

Kaitlyn had not been shy about expressing her opinion that Vining’s career was a negative influence on Emily. Five years ago, when Vining shot and killed a man while on duty, Wes began a fight for full custody of Emily. Emily was nine then and pitched a fit that had no effect on her father. Vining met with Wes privately.

“If you care as much about Emily as you say you do, you wouldn’t have abandoned her in the first place. I know Kaitlyn is putting you up to this. Understand one thing. Don’t even think about taking my daughter. I will make your life a living hell. And you know I know how to do it.”

Wes dropped the issue. As for Emily, she never forgave Kaitlyn. She extracted revenge by jerking Kaitlyn’s chain. Vining had to swear to Wes that she didn’t put their daughter up to it. On a girly shopping trip, Emily regaled Kaitlyn with tales about mother-daughter time at the gun range putting the family arsenal through a workout. Emily’s gun tale had a happy consequence for Vining. Kaitlyn stopped allowing Wes to bring their children into Vining’s home, in spite of Vining’s assurances that she secured her weapons at all times.

Vining was glad she didn’t have to put up with her ex’s spawn, although it seemed appropriate for Emily to have a relationship with her half-siblings. Still, at this stage of her life, Emily couldn’t care less about her half brothers and Vining knew she couldn’t force-feed relationships to her daughter.

Kaitlyn wasn’t the only reason Vining had developed an aversion to that type of woman. During her police career, Vining learned that the moneyed of the city, regardless of age, and especially the women, were often as ruthless as gangbangers in laying on attitude.

Pasadena had attracted the wealthy for generations. At the turn of the century, titans of industry built winter homes there and eventually relocated permanently, the balmy climate overwhelming all objections. Lesser neighborhoods sprouted like moons around the vast estates.

Many PPD officers who had arrested or written a traffic citation to one of the city’s affluent had heard, “I pay your salary. You work for me. I know your boss. I’ll have your job.” When Vining was a rookie, the tales of class distinction surprised her. It seemed something old-world and un-American. Before she’d personally experienced it, she’d thought of herself first and foremost as a cop, a member of the thin line that divides civilization from anarchy. Until she’d busted a judge’s son, she’d never thought of herself as a civil servant, a mere city employee.

She’d watched the teenager, wearing his private school uniform, give money to a guy outside a motel on the east side of town that was a known drug trade site. Minutes later, someone threw an eight ball of crack down to the kid from a second-story window. When Vining collared the boy, he went off on her. Something inside her snapped and she yanked and shoved him more than necessary while he threatened lawsuits and demanded to know if she knew who his father was.

“Yeah, he’s the father of a criminal,” she’d shot back.

Vining had to admit she’d developed attitudes of her own during her years on the Job. She was embarrassed to lay claim to some of them. She’d always wondered if she hadn’t mouthed off to that man she’d shot, whether things might have turned out differently. She resisted being a jaded cop, but feared she was on a one-way street and powerless to turn around. The Job got under one’s skin that way, like a slow-moving virus. T. B. Mann had hastened the journey.

She found the address on San Rafael Avenue. It wasn’t far from Frankie Lynde’s dump site. None of the investigators considered there might be a suspect among the affluent residents. Perhaps that reflected prejudice as well, but the police would say it was a judgment call. Outsiders called it profiling. In the grand scheme of things, it was unfair but practical.

The sun had dropped behind the hills along the arroyo’s west side, casting everything in a violet haze. Drivers traveling westbound on the 210 freeway, which ran north of the bridge and swooped around the foothills, had a tremendous view of the sunset and the silhouette of downtown L.A. At dusk or in the early-morning hours, if the smog wasn’t heavy, the way the light hit downtown L.A. miniaturized the buildings, putting Vining in mind of storybook cities in the books she’d read to Em, like the view Peter Pan and Wendy had when they’d soared above London. Or some of the old Fantasyland rides in Disneyland.

L.A. was some Fantasyland, all right.

She turned into the driveway and stopped at imposing iron gates shaded by a pair of olive trees. All she could see beyond the gates were poplar trees lining a curved cobblestone lane. An engraved brass plaque on the stone gate post said “Casa Feliz” with “Hughes” beneath it. There was a security camera above the gate keypad. The camera’s red light told Vining she was being recorded.

She looked at the camera’s make and model. She wanted such a motion-activated device for her home. After the attack, Wes had used his connections and helped Vining buy and install a security system, but cameras were the next step. Vining had not slept with a weapon in her bedroom until T. B. Mann. She knew lots of cops who did, but she had refused to live in paranoia.
Before.

Emily had asked if T. B. Mann would come to their home. Given Vining’s increased interest in home security, it would have been disingenuous to rule it out. Vining told her daughter a half-truth. T. B. Mann’s return was a possibility. There was no need to be afraid, but it was smart to be prepared, just as they had set in supplies for the big earthquake that might or might not occur in their lifetimes. Emily had seemed satisfied with that answer.

But Vining knew she would meet T. B. Mann again. It was her destiny.

Vining called out her location on the portable. As she signed off, the gate rolled open. She heard the approach of a car, the sonorous rumble of an older model, and saw a red streak between the spaces in a stand of bamboo planted for privacy along the iron fence. With a screech of tires, a sports car, low to the ground and fire engine red, rounded a curve in the driveway and sped into view. The convertible top was down and the driver, wearing huge Jackie O sunglasses, the tails of the long scarf tied over her head flapping in the wind, looked as if she had no intention of stopping at the now-open gate.

Vining froze, wondering if the woman was going to ram her Jeep head-on.

The woman awakened from her driving-daze and slammed on the brakes, sending the car fishtailing and skidding sideways, coming to a stop inches from Vining.

The sports car’s door dropped open and the woman extracted herself from the small vehicle, shooting out long legs clad in tight jeans and expensive boots with dangerously high heels. She stomped over to Vining, tearing off her sunglasses with one hand and planting the other on her hip. Her ring finger was weighted with a huge diamond wedding set. She looked to be around forty.

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. What the hell are you doing there?”

Vining fumbled to find her shield that was hanging from a chain around her neck. Her rattled state was due to the accident that had nearly happened, but the woman’s ice blue eyes and gimlet stare weren’t helping.

She regained her composure, got out of the car, and fired back her own take-no-B.S. gaze. “I’m Detective Nan Vining with the Pasadena Police Department.”

“Oh, oh, oh…” Each exclamation ascended the tonal scale. The woman gaped as she crept forward for a closer look at the shield. “So you are. I’ve been waiting an hour. Have to leave. Cocktails on the west side. Traffic. Last thing I want to do, but…I didn’t even think about checking it out until I turned on the news. I went out to get it and there it was.”

She couldn’t follow the woman’s elliptical story. “There what was?”

Vining’s cell phone rang. The display said it was Sergeant Early. The fact she was using her cell phone said she was avoiding the police dispatch frequency that was often monitored by reporters and cop geeks.

“Hi, Sarge. I’m talking to her. Thanks.” Vining ended the call and looked again at the brass plate that was engraved “Hughes.” “Are you Iris Thorne?”

“Yes, I am. My poor husband…I try, but I can’t get the hang of a new name. I had the old one for so long. So I’m sticking with Thorne. Just call me Iris.”

“You have a video—”

“That’s what I was trying to tell you.” Thorne grimaced as she looked at a big wristwatch. She swatted the air. “Jam cocktails. Come up to the house.”

Before Vining could protest, Thorne put on her sunglasses and climbed back into the sports car. She gunned the engine, sending a puff of exhaust out the tailpipe, and headed up the lane.

Vining caught the TR6 decal with the British flag affixed to the rear fender.

S I X T E E N

T
HORNE DROVE FAST AND VINING KEPT PACE. THE SIGHT OF HER SCARF
tails flapping and the older car speeding past formal landscaping of trimmed boxwood, white roses, and citrus trees made Vining feel as if she were in another country. She had never traveled, but Italy, Spain, or maybe Greece seemed about right.

Around a bend, a house came into view. A manse was more accurate.

Thorne rounded a tiered fountain framed by a hedge in the center of a circular driveway, scattering several cats lounging on the warm cobblestones.

She cut the engine. Again, the car door dropped open and out flew the legs. From a tiny purse, she fished out a cell phone. With an annoyed jerk of her hand, she freed the earpiece from the purse, disgorging tubes of lipstick that went clattering across the stones.

“Son of a bitch.”

Vining parked and got out, picking up an errant lipstick tube. She noted the interlocked Cs on the label. Chanel, pricier than anything Vining could afford.