Good Morning, Killer

“Have you been very close to this little girl? Helped her through …” He gestured with the pen, indicating spirals of unnamed suffering.

“Yes.”

He wanted to know more. After I described our morning talks and how Juliana had opened up to me, his belly jumped and he belched like a bald, satiated Roman emperor, and went back to the shooting.

“If the police were to claim you were a frustrated, jealous woman who was trying to avenge a betrayal by her lover, would you have some other explanation? Yes or no?”

The blue-stoned pen tapped against the pad.

“Yes or no?” he prompted.

“Can we stop playing games and can I just tell you—”

“Yes or no?”

“Yes.”

“What would be your explanation?”

“I wanted to stop him.”

Devon nodded encouragingly.

“You wanted to stop him from what?”

“From hurting me any more. Physically hurting me.”

“Would that involve some kind of self-defense on your part?”

“Yes, it would.”

“Would it be true to say you shot him in self-defense?”

I had seemed to lose direction, lost in some elastic loop of time.

“Yes.”

“Did you feel in physical danger?”

“I just wanted him to leave.”

“Did he leave?”

“No.”

“What did he do?”

“He attacked me. He wouldn’t stop. I kicked him in the groin and he backed off, and I warned him, but he came back at me. I dropped to the gun. I warned him again. I started shooting. We fought over the gun, and he got it away from me. He never stopped once he started coming at me, and I kept pulling the trigger.” “So he kept coming.”

“He did.”

“Even when you warned him, showed him the gun?”

“That’s right.”

“Even when you shot him, he didn’t run, or take evasive action?”

“No.”

“Nothing was going to stop him.”

I was unaware of everything except Devon’s rapid breath on the other side of the mesh, intimate as a priest’s.

“Why,” I said, faltering, “didn’t he stop?”

“I think it’s very possible,” Devon answered, “Detective Berringer went to your apartment with the intention of killing you.”

“Killing me?”

“You thought it was the other way around?”

“I was the one with the gun.”

“Yes,” said Devon, “that was the surprise.”

After a moment I shook my head, as if waking from a dream.

“You’re kidding, right? This is one of those outrageous legal arguments—”

“You can’t be objective,” Devon said. “I can. All I hear is you blaming yourself. It is absolutely not out of the question that this cop, who is used to violence, possibly depressed, despondent, getting older, close to retirement, financial problems, high on drugs, who knows what, finally resents the demands made on him by all the women in his life, and goes over there and takes it out on someone.” “Very creative,” I said tiredly. “You should be a writer,” totally forgetting that Devon County was also a celebrity author with two thrillers on the best-seller list.

I climbed out of the pool, dizzy with all that flip turning. It was just a few steps from the scorching patio to the cool kitchen, with its light cabinets and vinyl daisy tile and microwave as big as a boxcar. The refrigerator had cold water in the door. Inside the walk-through pantry there were marshmallows and chocolate bits you could chug out of the bag, and a shelf of neon-colored breakfast cereals.

The boys drank Gatorade and powdered fruit punch; there were flats of sodas and wholesale sacks of chips in the garage. All this was new to me, and I was as curious about the stand-alone freezer stocked with chicken nuggets, hot dogs, twelve-pack Klondike bars, whole chickens and racks of ribs as I would have been visiting a family in Japan. I never realized you could buy such huge tubs of peanut butter or cans of soup big enough for the entire fourth grade.

Mike Donnato had taken care of his mother until she died, in this house, of stomach cancer. There were far- flung siblings, but Mike was the only one with the courage to stick it out. She had lived in one of those extra back rooms with a fireplace and TV that nobody really uses, except to dump unfolded laundry and discarded pets. There was a mossy reek from the terrarium that held the baby chameleons; the carpeting, a cheap oatmealy remnant, felt cold underfoot, some dankness having to do with the plumbing.

“Who farted?” was the standard greeting from the Donnato boys.

It was a room without hope to begin with — thinly walled, sliding glass doors opening to a useless jag of the yard, an odd space looking at the back fence. This was where I slept, on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by Mike’s parents’ effects, which were touchingly arranged as they had been in the hobby room of their big home in Glendale: Dad’s preoccupations in one half, Mom’s on the other. So you had a Bernina sewing machine, an ironing board and bins of fabric and envelopes of clothing patterns on one side; then a bench with a magnifying glass and all manner of fly-fishing materials and magazines. There were other oddities — a rocking horse, a white cabinet I had not opened, valuable-looking antique wicker chairs, jug lamps, vinyl records (A Swingin’ Christmas), framed art posters from the seventies, and the kinds of novels people don’t read anymore: Lord Jim, Catch-22, Shogun, Cancer Ward, The Black Marble, War and Remembrance. If I didn’t feel bad enough, I could wallow in the ash-cold remnants of two extinguished lives.

“Free on bail” was not the way I would have put it. I was free to wander through the living room, lie on the beat-up burgundy-colored sectional (if I wanted to vacuum the cat hair), or sit in Mike’s reclining chair and look at cable on a big blurry-screened TV. I could pace the hallway, passing the bedrooms in about four seconds — no daylight, nothing on the walls, except the kids’ doors plastered with Police Line Do Not Cross tape and puzzles that spelled their names, Kevin, Justin, Ian.

I was free to sit on the small deck with the standard grill and white plastic umbrella table, and look up at a patch of milky sky, and know this was a preview, an aperitif, of prison life. I missed my lifeguard friend. I missed the shower talk and the redtail hawks that sailed above the pool in perfect freedom.

Andrew? I didn’t know who he was anymore.

The highlight of the day would be the call from the law firm, usually with more bad news.

I learned, one standard-issue hot ’n’ hazy valley morning, that the deputy district attorney prosecuting my case would be Mark Rauch, and realized, way too late, the devastating mistake I had made in not involving Mark Rauch in the Santa Monica kidnapping, not paying respects, not providing a political opening for which he might show gratitude, or at least mercy. This might have been the reason Rauch maneuvered to be assigned to this case — or more likely, he saw it as a high-profile opportunity to continue to build a citywide presence for a mayoralty run. So much for keeping us out of the press. The words “slam dunk” were being bandied about the courthouse.

“He’s a scary guy,” I told Devon.