Lemon Reef (35 page)

*

The small café had just a few tables and a bar with stools, but the high ceilings made it feel cavernous upon entering. Linoleum squares zigzagged in a pattern that gave the floor a high-stakes feel. Three walls were glass, looking out onto the intersecting avenues. It was empty but for a table near the back, at which sat a tall man with broad shoulders. He had dark hair and a clean-shaven square jaw. His hairline receded some, giving the impression of a larger forehead, and he wore reading glasses, which he immediately took off when he noticed us. He waited to see if I was looking for someone, too, and then he nervously smiled and waved to me.

We sat on wooden benches across from one another, ketchup- and mustard-crusted dispensers and other condiments aligning the wall to which our table was adjacent. There was a sticky substance in the exact spot my elbow naturally fell, and I finally gave up trying to wipe it and put my hands in my lap.

“I'm Steve,” he said. Ida and I introduced ourselves. “I take it I met Nicole yesterday?”

I nodded. “Sorry about your window.”

He laughed a little. “I've been hearing about her for a long time.” Then he said, “And you're Jenna, huh? I've been hearing about you, too.” I was desperate to know what he had heard, but I waited for him to tell me. He took a sip of his coffee, asked if we wanted any. I said no; Ida said yes. He called the waiter over and ordered her a cup. Then he stirred some sugar into his cup and tested it. “You were Del's first love,” he said. “She told me she lost her virginity with you on a beach.” He chuckled and shrugged as if he was not quite sure how it would be possible, but he was open to the idea.

I could see out of the corner of my eye Ida looking at Steve with disbelief. I smiled, feeling shocked and thrilled to know Del had represented us that way.

“What about you?” I asked. “Were you and Del lovers?”

“No,” he said, “not exactly. I wanted to be. But Del was totally focused on Khila and on trying to get out.” Steve looked around a bit aimlessly. “And to be honest, she really just needed me to be her friend now because she was in a bad situation and it was getting worse. I don't know what you already know.” He glanced at me but didn't wait for a response. “Del's been wanting to leave Talon for a long time, but she couldn't figure out how to do it. She was convinced he had enough bad on her to take Khila away. Then she heard you were a judge, and she thought maybe you would know how to help her.”

I was taken aback. Was I was the woman she was referring to on the audiotape?

“She was trying to figure out how to get back in touch with you,” Steve said.

“All she had to do was call. She didn't know that?”

“She was getting ready to call you. She got your number from your friend that she worked with.”

Which friend? Gail and Katie would have told me—better have told me—if Del had asked either of them for my number.

He added, I assume in response to my confused expression, “Well, actually, she stole it off your friend's cell phone.” He shrugged as he said, “I guess she didn't want to ask for it. She thought your friend wouldn't give it to her without asking you first, and she wasn't ready to talk to you yet.”

“What was she waiting for?”

He twisted in his seat, tilted his head to loosen his neck. “Del heard that Talon made a video of that thing that went down”—he looked to Ida—“when the Thomas kid was killed. Del thought it could get Sid off.” To me, he said, “She wanted to get the video before she called you. I told her not to wait…But she…” He dropped his head in a gesture of defeat.

Ida was staring at me, and I thought she was trying to figure out if we should tell Steve about the video from the boat. But what she said then was, “Sid is really innocent?”

Steve seemed surprised by the question. “Yes. You didn't know that?”

Ida shrugged.

I started to speak and then stopped myself from asking her if she'd been sleepwalking for the last twelve hours. Had she just missed the whole part about why we had gone to the boat? Then I remembered what she'd revealed to me in the car, about how she'd slept with Talon, and I knew there was just so much information that Ida could bear to take in about him and about what he had done to Del and to Sid. As Nicole had told me earlier, if Ida slept with Talon and Talon killed Del, Ida would never forgive herself.

“Sid's innocent,” Steve said. “I know because I saw Sid at Del's house at the same time that the Thomas kid was killed. I was with Del when Sid showed up. Del started acting really strange. She pushed me out the back door so that me and Sid wouldn't see each other. I watched from my own house until Sid left, which was several hours later.”

I exhaled, allowed myself to take minor comfort from the knowledge that the tape I might have destroyed wasn't the only evidence of Sid's innocence. Steve could testify. We were silent for a few moments. He stirred his coffee; I watched the light reflecting on the back wall.

Ida said, “We thought Del went on the boat to get sex tapes back.”

“Oh, I think she did. She wanted to get those tapes, too.” Steve hesitated. With scrunched brows that conveyed bemusement, he said, “Talon videotaped all his crimes.” Tone shifting from confusion to challenge, he added, “He's a fucking freak. I think the tapes were like trophies or something. Or”—he shook his head slightly, twisted his mouth—“Del thought Talon taped that shit because he couldn't remember it after he did it.”

“Yeah, but the sex tapes weren't a crime,” Ida said. “Del agreed to do those.”

Steve's otherwise gentle and kind demeanor gave way to a flash of anger. “She didn't
agree
.” His face squared with Ida's. “Who said she agreed?”

Ida's hand jerked and hit her coffee cup, knocking it over. The coffee spilled onto the table and over the edge into Steve's lap. Ida sputtered apologies. Steve scooted out of the booth as Ida and I threw napkins at the caramel liquid expanding to and around every border like mud in a slide. The waiter came quickly with towels and cleaned up the spill. Steve held a napkin against his shirt, trying to absorb what he could to prevent a stain.

When he sat down again, he continued without missing a beat. “Look, I know it's hard to understand, but I've spent a lot of time with Talon, and I'm telling you he's a really sick guy. The sex stuff was his way of punishing Del. If she did something he didn't like, he'd bring some strange guy home and put her through it. He'd make her prove she loved him by doing things she didn't want to do.” He sighed, looked around, ran his hand through his hair. “She made the best of it, especially at the beginning. Maybe she even got into it sometimes, I don't really know. There were some good times—I don't mean to say it was all bad—long periods when they got along okay, I guess, and she felt hopeful about the marriage.” There was a weighty pause. Steve drew a breath. “Then, about eight or nine months ago, Del got a job waitressing at the deli. It was work to her. But he got convinced”—underscored by a karate chop to the air—“she was having an affair, and that's when things got really twisted.” Steve's voice dropped on the word
really
.

“Talon got insanely jealous, but he wouldn't admit it. He was beating her, trying to get her to admit that she was doing something wrong. There was all this sex stuff. She was constantly having to calm him down and reassure him. Then he started choosing her clothes, telling her when she could take a shower. He started controlling
everything
. She couldn't take a shit without him watching. It was
horrible
,” Steve continued, “and she was suffering.” He looked at Ida now. “That's when we started trying to collect evidence—the photos, the tape.”

Ida's cheeks were flushed and her breathing was heavier than usual. Her dark eyes shifted back and forth nervously. She looked like she was about to vomit. I put my hand on her shoulder to calm her.

“About a week ago,” Steve said, “Talon hit Khila. Del wasn't home when she was supposed to be. He didn't know where she was. He decided to teach her a lesson by hurting the kid.” Steve sighed, glanced at me, then at Ida, then back at his cup and said, “I thought I'd seen Del as upset as she could get, but I was wrong. I think the only thing that stopped Del from killing Talon that night was the idea that you could help her get custody.”

A week ago had been around the time Del contacted the underground people. Tears welling, I looked at a spot on the table between us. I imagined how desperate she must have been feeling to have made that call.

“That's when the trip came up. She'd thought for a while that Talon kept the videotapes on Kramer's boat, so she agreed to go.” I could see Steve tremble, his face drifting to the window. “I know I should've come forward a lot sooner about the Sid stuff—about everything that was going on. But Del was terrified, and she was right to be, 'cause, well, here we are. Now it doesn't matter about her. And anyway, I think she would've wanted me to help Sid now. She never got right about what she'd done to him.”

His look was equal parts agony and anger. “I can't believe she went on the boat instead of leaving that sick motherfucker. She was so close to getting out. Del couldn't live with what she did to Sid, and she didn't feel like she would ever be able to fix it. The closer she got to freeing herself, the worse she felt about what happened. It was the bind Talon put her in—she couldn't free herself without leaving Sid in prison for life. She couldn't free Sid without running the risk of going to prison herself.” He fidgeted with his napkin and then said, “The tape was the only way she could think of to help both of them.”

The conversation with Steve—his confession, really—was interrupted by a frantic call from Pascale. Khila was missing.

The drive back to Pascale's was a blur of gray rooftops and green highway signs. We serpentined through stop-and-go freeway traffic; my heart raced the speedometer. On the main roads, I rolled past stop signs and darted through yellow lights, all that rushing to land at Pascale's house with little additional information and nothing to do now but wait.

Khila had snuck out sometime in the night, and Talon had discovered her missing when he had gone to wake her that morning. He was out now with the police looking for her. Pascale and I paced the boxlike living room, taking turns peering out the window every few minutes in hope of seeing the kid coming up the driveway. I had to keep my mind from going to the most frightening places, imagining Khila out there alone at night, getting picked up, somebody hurting her, still hurting her. Or was she dead? Was that the news we would get this day?

As concerned as I was about Khila, I couldn't help noticing Ida was acting oddly. She stood staring off, not saying anything for long periods of time, the blink of her long lashes the only sign of life. Then she would ratchet her body or clench her fists, cringing, it seemed, at some intolerable thought or idea.

Talon called several times over the next hour to check in, not trusting Pascale to notify him if Khila showed up at Pascale's house. Pascale smoked and paced.

With bridled impatience, Ida asked, “Where
is
Nicole?”

Only then did it occur to me that Nicole had to be with Khila. Khila knew Nicole was the one person in the world who would have done anything for her and not given a care about getting in trouble for it. If she was trying to run away, Nicole was the person she would have gone to. When I told Pascale I thought Nicole was with Khila, it was clear she hadn't yet considered that herself. Realizing I probably was right, she sighed, her face softened, and she sat down for the first time in over an hour. She lit a cigarette and took an extra-long draw, and then she let the smoke seep from her lips. I sat down on the couch next to Pascale, noticed the raised veins in her bony hand. “So where would Nicole take her? To a friend's house, maybe?”

“Nicole doesn't have any friends,” Ida said. “They're probably just driving around. Nicole'll bring her back.”

More time passed. I filled it by retrieving messages from work, returning a few calls. I called Madison to tell her what was happening but could only reach her voicemail. Ida had a deck of cards out. She was playing solitaire. She seemed in a kind of private agony, her jaw tightening to a bulge, her face a twist of grimaces and squints that seemed to be getting more extreme. I suspected whatever was going through her mind had to do with the things Steve had told us about how Talon had treated both Sid and Del. I talked Ida into playing spit with me, hoping to distract her from whatever was plaguing her and to help her feel less alone.

The back door was open. A warm breeze ruffled loose papers and relieved the otherwise stifling heat. The house smelled of coffee, still brewing, menthol cigarettes, and something like wet leather, from the moisture and heat that blew in with the breeze. Ida and I had pushed the coffee table aside to make room and were now on the living floor engaged in a fierce spit battle, hands flying, cards slapping, when my cell phone rang. I grabbed the phone and answered it as I slammed down my last card.

“Jenna, it's Margaret Todd. I thought you might want to know Del sent you the fax. I mean she arranged for it to be sent to you.”

“What?”
I went out to the porch for privacy.

“Let me explain. Del told the underground folks about Talon's juvenile record. They accessed it with the intention of giving it to her to bring with her to California on Wednesday morning.”

Had I heard her correctly? “Del was coming to California?”

“Yes.” Margaret continued, “It was information she thought you should have to help her explain why the situation was so urgent. When Del didn't show for the meeting on Tuesday, they thought that maybe she'd met up with you on her own. So they faxed it to you.”