****
Yet, when he woke up at three a.m., as he lay next to a ravishing woman who made love like a goddess, a strange thought meandered through his mind. The thought of Walter Neff sitting on death row for eighteen years, waiting for the gas in Alcatraz.
What happens at daybreak? Does she go back to Inglewood and run Richard’s gas station for the rest of her life? Find a man to run it for her, and never give a thought to the detective who lost his soul and sense to her? He sat at the table near the opened window, smoking his Chesterfield. It was raining hot and hard splotches that made the air smell like dusty pavement. She’d passed out from too much gin. He could easily search the suitcase he saw laying on the shelf, if he could muster the courage.
He heard her stir, saw her slide out of bed, and walk towards the bathroom. Instinctively, his hand found his holster and he felt for his .38. Was she hiding her .22, or looking for it? He wiggled into his clothes and slipped out the door.
****
“Yeah, I left, but I’m no heel, Malone. It’s not like we fell in love. She’s a beautiful woman but the world is full of beautiful women, right?”
Malone shifted in his chair. “You stepped in it big time, Kelly boy. Two seconds after you left she was banging on the innkeeper’s door crying rape.”
The Orange County Jail was like any other jail, bleak and sparsely furnished; two chairs and a table in a room soundproofed for lawyer conferences. Malone had brought him cigarettes and cookies and pithy advice: dummy up. His old uniformed brothers-in-crime-fighting were now new enemies still piqued at his rapid rise through the ranks. Who makes detective after four years in uniform? Not any of their friends on the police force.
“I tell you, she set me up, but why?” He took a long, frantic drag off his fourth cigarette.
“Think on it, Kelly. Did she do or say anything that might tell us something about why?”
He promised to try and remember details. It’d be easier Monday afternoon after Judge Patterson cleared the drunk tank. Alone in the silence, he tried to fit the pieces into the puzzle.
“She told me her husband was an alki, but she had enough booze in her motel room to host a convention,” he told public defender Larry Stillman. “She drank enough to float a battleship, but walked straight into the bathroom.”
“Were you drunk too?”
“Just buzzed. I was there for the sex, not the booze.”
“No diminished capacity defense in your future.”
“Don’t get me wrong. I was there for information too. Malone suspected she shot her husband and practically ordered me to interrogate her.” Kelly nibbled at a chocolate chip cookie. “Has Malone come up with anything?”
“Only that Vickie’s sticking around until…the issues are resolved.”
“That could take years!”
Stillman took papers from his briefcase and spread them on the table. “Unless you take a plea. Suspended sentence. Three years probation.”
“Hell, no. I’m not pleading guilty to something I didn’t do. She consented. Ask her why a grieving widow answers the door in a blue silk robe, why don’t you? ”
“She doesn’t own a blue silk robe.”
“The hell she don’t!”
So it went for an hour and a half until Kelly realized how stupid he sounded. He made Stillman a promise too. He’d think about a plea even though Stillman said, “You won’t be a cop anymore but you’ll be out of jail.”
“And how will I support myself? Pump gas?”
****
On his next visit, four weeks and plenty of excuses later, Stillman brought cigarettes, cookies, and photographs. “You asked me how you’d make a living if you took a plea? Consider being a P.I. These pictures cost your mother five hundred dollars.”
Kelly leafed through the photos of Malone and Vickie lunching at the Beach House Restaurant in Ventura. It didn’t look like any interrogation he’d ever witnessed. Vickie wore sandals and a swim suit cover-up—blue terrycloth with no straps, just elastic at the top and waist. She was smiling too, and leaning forward like she was hanging on Malone’s every word.
“This is meeting number four the shamus witnessed, but this is the first time he got close enough for pictures.”
“Malone’s probably just doing his job,” Kelly mumbled.
“Another two weeks and neither one of them will need a job,” Stillman said. “Conklin was well-insured. Did Malone ever indicate he knew Vickie before her husband’s death? Ever take a vacation in Inglewood?”
“Never. He’s been seeing Laura Martin.”
“The kindergarten teacher?” Kelly nodded yes. “Well, it’s doubtful Malone and Vickie schemed up a frame in the time it took to get from the police station to the coroner’s office. I mean, her husband was already dead—kinda late to arrange a fall-guy.” Stillman was thinking out loud, but Kelly had retreated into himself, revisiting his grandmother’s parlor and the love birds.
“Neff needed a fall-guy,” he said.
“Who?”
“Walter Neff. Nobody remembers him and why should they? He was an insurance salesman. Thirty-five. Unmarried. No visible scars. The newspaper said the insurance company and the police fingered a guy named Nino Vacetti as the shooter. Neff was above suspicion.”
“Keep talking, Kelly.”
“Maybe Malone told Vickie he knew she’d killed her husband, and she needed a Nino to throw off suspicion on her…maybe by becoming a victim herself.”
“Passion, plot, and betrayal in fifteen minutes?”
“Thirty if you count driving her to the Wagon Wheel.”
Split-second, life-altering decisions can happen like that. He’d decided to be a cop like that. Something catches a man’s eye, maybe something that jars a long-forgotten desire or rubs salt into a wound that never healed. But once a man, any man, makes his decision, he pursues it without a thought about other people. His mother begged him to become an accountant; policing was too dangerous. He didn’t care. It’s what he wanted and maybe Malone wanted Vickie a thousand times more than a badge or a friendship.
That’s what he’d tell Malone. What he remembered most about his night with Vickie—that he remembered forgetting—everything except what he wanted. That’s what Neff’s story was all about. Decisions based on passion can be made by anyone: kings, cops, or insurance salesmen. “I’ll take that plea,” he told Stillman, because he’d decided he didn’t want to be a cop anymore. All he wanted was a loaded .38 and enough gas to get his Chevy to Inglewood.
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