After she left, he called his brother Kevin, the youngest in the family. The cop. “You working this afternoon, bud?” he asked.
“Yep. Going in around two. Why?”
“Okay, here’s the thing. I had a little incident that I never mentioned….”
“Aw, Christ, you got cops after you for something?”
“No! Could you listen for once? Here’s what happened. I was leaving this bar a couple of weeks ago and there was a woman in trouble at the far end of the parking lot. She was yelling for help from the inside of a car that was rocking off the shocks. I could make out two people in the front passenger seat and she was putting up a fight, so I checked it out. I knocked on the window and the guy slid it down an inch and told me to go away, but I could see he had the seat reclined and his hand over her mouth. So I broke the window and got her out.”
“You broke the window?” Kevin asked. “Is that how you hurt the hand?”
“Yeah…. I don’t think we need to tell Mom about that, huh?”
“He coming after you for that? For breaking the window?”
“Oh, I wish. Nah, he ran for his life. The woman—nice woman, by the way—was out on her first real date with him. She’d met him for coffee, talked on the phone, and she was meeting him at the bar rather than letting him come to her house. You know, trying to be careful, I guess. She was real shook up, so I got her a cup of coffee. I gave her my business card in case she needs me to back up her story. The guy was assaulting her. He was going to rape her, Kevin.”
“You sure about that?”
“Nah, maybe he just wanted to hold her down and kiss her a little while she was screaming her brains out and kicking hard enough to rock a big old Tahoe. You’re right—he probably just wanted to talk about Greek philosophers and she was just so fucking uncooperative—”
“Okay, okay. What’s this got to do with me?”
“I saw her today. She dropped by to say thanks. She’s holding up okay. She hasn’t heard a word from him or anything. She’s getting past it real good.”
“Yeah?”
“But I think we should know who he is.”
“We? Got a puppy in your pocket, brother?”
“You and me, big shot. I got the license plate number, make and model. See, she’s an emergency room nurse and he told her he was a paramedic. It makes sense she should figure him for part of the family, you know? But a friend of hers who really is a paramedic checked and couldn’t locate him. Maybe he’s just some sick jerk who knows what lines to use to get women to feel safe.”
“Oh, I get it. You’d like to have a discussion with him about that?”
“Oh, no, that’s not what this is about. I’d like to know who he is, though. For safety reasons. And you—as a cop—might want to check and see if he has a problem in this area. Maybe you look him up and it isn’t the first time, huh? Maybe you’ll want me to officially report what I saw? Because I saw something real bad. Or maybe you’ll want to talk with the woman I helped out, see if she can corroborate that he’s just a lying slimeball who…” Walt took a breath. “I know you’re not supposed to tell me about his record. But you could check.”
“Why didn’t your girl call the police that night?”
“Well, that night, she was all shook up and just said no, forget it. But today, when we had coffee, she explained. She did call the police and left a message that she’d had a real close call and had information they might like to have, but no one called her back. See, because she tried telling the police and they ignored her, I decided it’s time to get involved, call you.”
“Probably because there’s no crime, except maybe you breaking the guy’s window….”
“We wouldn’t have wanted to wait until there was a crime,” Walt said a little hotly. Then, more calmly, he added, “She’s done a lot of rape exams for police in the emergency room and it turns out that even when the victim is all beat up and hurt real bad, it’s still hard to pin it on the guy. This situation never got there. She had a real bad feeling about what he was going to do, but he never even popped a button. I told her about you. I offered to call you at home, man. Get your opinion.”
“Doesn’t sound like there was that much to it, when you get down to it.”
“It was an assault,” Walt said. “I gotta wonder if it’s ever happened to some woman who wasn’t lucky enough to have a big, ugly guy leaving the bar just when she was screaming and rocking the car. I just gotta wonder.”
Kevin was silent a moment. “I can check that. If so, your girl might come in handy. I can’t tell you that, you know. By the book, you know.”
“But you can tell me a name. Would you get in trouble for telling me a name?”
“I could, yeah.”
“Okay, then it’ll be in the vault. No one will ever know you gave me a name. I could find this stuff out some other way, but—”
“Then why not do that, Walt? Find it out some other way?”
“Because, Kevin—if he’s attacked women before, it’s not me who should know about it. It’s the police. Right?”
Kevin sighed. “Right. Yeah.”
“But if I want to keep my eyes open for this guy, be ready in case he gives her more trouble—ready to call you, of course—a name would help. I give you this story, you give me a name. That’s all.”
“And you swear to me, you never approach this guy? Never touch him?”
“Absolutely, I swear. No approaching, no touching.”
“All right, give me the data.”
Walt smiled into the phone. “So, I’m a confidential informant. A C.I. Cool.”
Walt recited the plate, make and model.
“You get a good look at him, Walt?”
“Oh, yeah. I saw him in the bar, saw him leave with her. I can identify him. Six feet, brown and brown, chiseled chin…. His hair is long enough to comb. You know what I’m saying? Not a butch military cut, and not over the collar. Styled.”
“Okay, good. I think we don’t tell the woman,” Kevin said. “I might ask you for her name and phone number later, all right?”
“I don’t have that offhand. I don’t even know her last name. I know her first name and that she’s an emergency room nurse, so you could probably find her easy. I don’t know that I’ll ever see her again,” Walt said. “But I gave her my card, my office and home numbers in case she needs me for anything, and she’s nice. You can tell in one minute she’s kind. That she only wants to help people. And this asshole was going to hurt her. That’s not something you just let go.”
Kevin laughed into the phone. “Really, who would take you for a Good Samaritan.”
“That’s the thing. People never know who they’re dealing with, do they? This woman? She’d never go out with someone who looks like me, but the guy she thought was safe as a kitten, he turned out to be the bad guy.”
The fourth member of the tight group of girlfriends, and the least often available, was Dr. Beth Halsley. Beth started in premed at USC and stayed there for medical school, becoming a women’s doctor. She had always been one of those students who didn’t have to work for grades and excelled effortlessly on tests—until med school, at least. She had a nerdy brain inside a model’s body.
She had been more beautiful than any of the other high school girls, but not as popular—people thought of her as stuck-up. She wasn’t. She always had a lot on her mind and she was easily bored. True, she was a cheerleader like Julie, Cassie and Marty, but she was also a scholar, debater, gymnast, chess champion and president of the science club. She had almost never gone out on a date; it wasn’t long before boys avoided her like the plague. She was just too intimidating. And she’d never learned those wily, flirty games.
But the girls—Cassie, Julie and Marty—though nothing like her, loved her, understood her, envied her in so many ways. Beth was the one to unequivocally make good and when she graduated from premed and medical school in L.A., they were there, cheering the loudest of all. And now that she was newly
transplanted back in the Sacramento Valley in a small women’s clinic, they were bringing their privates to her for their exams and other medical needs.
Beth called Julie in the morning. “Hey, don’t faint, but I can get out of the clinic for a couple of hours today. I got in touch with Cassie and Marty and they’re free for lunch. Noon at Ernesto’s. How about you?”
“Hmm. Lotta mommy stuff going on today, but I’ll see what I can do,” Julie said.
“Well, try,” Beth said. “I miss the heck out of you. I haven’t seen you in a couple of months!”
Julie couldn’t bear the thought of missing lunch with the girls. But she couldn’t afford it. And the morning had been stressful. Right after a bout of morning sickness, Julie spent a couple of hours going over the bills, trying to decide which one to pay, which one to let slide. She’d barely recovered from her early-morning nausea when the dog, Tess, threw up right on her shoes. In her shoes. Armed with paper towels she usually tried to ration, she began mopping. As she was on her hands and knees scooping and wiping, Tess licked her face, knocking her back on her butt, disgusted, with an “Ewwww.” She had to hose out her shoes on the back patio, which made her cry. If she’d had two nickels to rub together, she would have thrown the damn shoes in the trash.
When she had the kids all loaded in the car to take Jeffy to a Parks and Rec summer program, the engine wouldn’t start. It wouldn’t even turn over. She got her mom to drive over, give her a jump and, thank God, that did it. On to Jeffy’s program to drop him off, then to the auto supply to buy a new battery. She had to try three credit cards for one to be approved. It was looking like both those bills she was sitting on would have to slide. Then she dropped Clint and Stephie off at their grandma’s for a couple of hours so Julie could join her friends for lunch. She had already decided she would make an excuse, say she had already eaten, but wanted to meet them for at least a glass of iced tea. When she got back to the car, reaching into her purse for her keys, she noticed that her mom had tucked a twenty into her purse.
And she cried. Again.
“It’s just pregnancy,” she muttered to herself, wiping at her eyes. But it was also the anxiety of having no money, worrying about the shame of having the electricity shut off, having her mom always slip a twenty into her purse because she was so pitifully broke.
Julie had just one older brother—Brad. Brad went to college, met a girl and got engaged, married fourteen months later after he was settled in a nice, cushy CPA job. Then and only then he went to work on an MBA to make his job even cushier. After that he and his wife decided to start their family and, like many of their friends, they seemed to have a choice about that. When they used birth control they didn’t have children and they never had a slip; when they went off birth control, they reproduced. At thirty-two, Brad and his wife, Lisa, had a three-year-old boy, a one-year-old girl and a vasectomy.
Such was not the case with Julie and Billy. She’d been a few months pregnant already when they married at barely nineteen. Billy worked part-time and went to school part-time, earning his degree at twenty-four, when Jeffy was four years old. If they’d had it their way, Jeffy would be at least ten before they had another baby; they were still so young, completely strapped with school loans, credit-card bills and low-paying jobs. They were compulsive about protection, except one night when they didn’t use a condom and spermicide because they were so worked up, in a fever, wild. One time, just one time, and it hadn’t even been during a vulnerable time of the month. Hello, Clint! Clint arrived when Jeffy was barely in kindergarten, the first year Billy was with the fire department. The next year, Stephie—the result of a diaphragm that Beth said probably wasn’t a good fit.
Billy knew the value of an education and had pursued it while waiting for an opening in the fire department. He’d wanted to be a fireman since he was six; it was a childhood dream. It was also a good job with good benefits and a pension, but when you have three kids, lots of bills, a stay-at-home wife, the early years can be tight. If he had any real fascination with any other field, there were probably endless opportunities for a man with a degree, but in his job he had adventure and saved lives, and that meant more to him than anything.
Although Julie’s parents were both generous and patient, Julie felt she’d let them down by marrying so young, having three children before she was thirty. She could sense they were frustrated with Julie and Billy’s chronic trouble of keeping up with expenses. It was taking them a damn long time to get on their feet. Her parents slipped her money they didn’t have to give Brad, picked up the tab for things like Jeffy’s soccer or Parks and Rec programs, and Julie never told Billy about any of it. Any fancy toys the kids had, like the laptop or video games, came from Grandma and Grandpa or maybe Uncle Brad. The thought of telling her mother she was pregnant again chilled her. She would say, What about that vasectomy you’d planned on? What about it, indeed? Billy was supposed to take care of that and had simply put it off, a little nervous about having his testicles sliced into, as if oblivious to the complications of piling child upon child on a modest income. She had the IUD; they should have been safe for the time it took him to come to terms with it. But she was pregnant again, anyway.
Julie complained to Cassie about money, about stretching things so far month after month, but she could tell Cassie didn’t take it all that seriously. After all, they somehow always managed and Cassie would die to have her problems. To Cassie, who was getting by but alone, a tight budget seemed like less of a problem than not having a partner, a family. And Julie just couldn’t tell Marty, who seemed to have it made.
But Julie went to lunch even though she could’ve put that twenty in the gas tank, because sometimes she just needed to be with her friends. She was the last one to arrive and the girls greeted her as though they hadn’t seen her in a year, though she’d seen Cassie and Marty recently.
“Wine?” Cassie asked as Julie sat down.
“No, thanks,” Julie said. “Carpool.” Of course, there was no carpool. “Beth? You’re not having a glass of wine?”
“On call,” she said, smiling. “Again. But I’m covered for lunch.”
“Is that how you keep your figure? Being on call?” Julie asked.
And then all four of them ordered salads, even Julie.
“I weigh the same, but they’re working me to death,” Beth said. “I’m delivering all the middle-of-the-night babies. The joys of being the new guy.”
“Speaking of new guys…any in your life?” Cassie asked, because this was Cassie’s main interest. And one of the only things that perplexed her was how a woman as accomplished and beautiful as Beth remained completely unattached. True, Beth was hard to please, a perfectionist. But still, with that in mind, she figured Beth would have landed the perfect man by now.
“You’re kidding, right?” she said, sipping her tea. “I went out with an anal, boring internist a couple of times, but I’d rather have been reading a good novel. He almost put me to sleep.”
“I guess he’s not getting an encore,” Marty said.
“Absolutely not. Honestly, I work, then I go home and sleep until the phone rings….”
“How are you liking the new clinic?” Cassie asked.
“I’m going to like it a lot better when I’m not the new guy anymore, but it’s a great little shop. Good staff. A lot of fresh-faced young pregnant girls as well as some older pregnant women—one of our docs has a real nice fertility practice.” Then to Cassie she said, “How about you? Any new guys?”
Cassie and Julie exchanged quick glances. Cassie hadn’t mentioned her incident to the others and, really, she just didn’t want to go through all that again, even in the telling. “I’ve sworn off men,” she said. “I draw only jerks and assholes.”
Beth just laughed. “The right one will probably turn up when you least expect him.”
“So everyone says. I don’t think I care that much about the man, but it’s going to be damn hard to have children without one.”
r /> “You don’t need a man to have a baby, Cassie,” Beth said.
“Gee, I know I didn’t get the best grades in school, but according to my biology teacher, that’s one of the things you absolutely do need,” Julie said.
“What you need is sperm,” Beth said. And with a dismissive wave of her hand, she said, “Easy.”
“Holy smokes,” Julie said.
“Good idea,” Marty said. “Marriage is way overrated.”
Julie’s gaze shot from Beth to Marty, but Cassie was focused on Beth. “Would you do something like that? Have a baby without a husband?”
“I’m not in the market for a baby,” Beth said. “I have a feeling I’ll be better at delivering them than having them. But really, half the female doctors I know are married to doctors. They’re both under pressure, working long hours, and they do fine. It kind of looks like a good nanny is more valuable than a good husband.”
“What do you mean, marriage is way overrated?” Julie asked Marty. And then she reached for Cassie’s glass of wine, but before taking a gulp, she slid it back.
With precision timing, the salads arrived, along with a basket of warm, fresh bread.
Julie wasn’t done with Marty. “What do you mean?” she asked. “I thought you and Joe invented marriage! You’re not having trouble or anything, are you?”
Marty tore off a piece of bread and with a shrug said, “We’re fine. I guess. But I ask myself—is this it? Forever? This guy who lives like a slob and doesn’t want to do any of the things he liked to do before we were married? He used to take me out, you know. Movies, dinner, nice things. Now it’s sports or boating or camping. On his days off, he doesn’t bother to shower till he has to go back to work. I come home from work and it looks like some homeless guy broke into the house and tore the place up. And once he slipped the ring on, that was it for romance. Now foreplay at our house is, ‘You awake?’”
Julie actually sprayed a mouthful of iced tea as she burst into laughter. When she came under control, fanning her face, grinning, she said, “I can answer that question. Is this all there is? Yeah—this is it, girlfriend. And I signed up.”