One Door Away From Heaven

Chapter 37

LEAVING WITHOUT EXPLANATION, F. Bronson closed the office door behind her.

From every side, feline stares fixed Micky with the intensity of security cameras. She felt as if the absent F still watched her magically through the unblinking eyes of these photo familiars.

The issue had become not the danger to Leilani, but Micky's reliability, her integrity or lack of it.

Now the heat wasn't just a condition, but a presence, like a clumsy man too eager in his passion, all moist hands and hot breath, pressing and persistent, suffocating in his need.

She would have sworn the sultry air was thick with the scent of fur, a musky redolence. Maybe F had cats at home, real cats, not just posters. Maybe she carried their dander on her clothes, in her hair.

Micky sat with her hands tightly clutching the purse in her lap, and when a minute had passed, she closed her eyes against the stares of the cats. She closed them also against the false yet convincing perception that the office was rapidly growing smaller, that it had become correctional in design, with the sterility and the restrictive proportions known to inspire either rehabilitation or suicide.

Claustrophobia, nausea, and humiliation steeped Micky with more debilitating effect than did the heat, the humidity, and the scent of cats. But what distressed her more than all these things was an anger cooking in her heart, as bitter as any brew concocted in a cauldron full of goat blood, eye of newt, and tongue of bat.

Anger was a reliable defense, but one that allowed no chance of final victory. Anger was a medicine but never a cure, briefly numbing the pain without extracting the thorn that caused the agony.

Now she could afford anger less than ever. If she answered F's bureaucratic arrogance and insults with the double-barreled blast of sarcasm and ridicule that she had used to cut down formidable targets in the past, her petty satisfaction would come at Leilani's expense.

F had left the room most likely to instruct the receptionist to call the police to check out Micky's story of an early release from prison. After all, she might be a dangerous fugitive who had come here, dressed in a coral-pink suit and pleated white shell and white high-heeled shoes, to steal the office coffee fund or to abscond with an entire carton of that electrifyingly well-written pamphlet about the link between secondhand cigarette smoke and the alarming rise in the number of child werewolves.

Trying to dampen her anger, Micky reminded herself that her choices — and hers alone — had landed her in prison and had led to the humiliation that now both humbled and galled her. F. Bronson hadn't hooked her up with the deadbeat document forger who had taken her down with him. Nor was F responsible for Micky's bull-headed refusal to turn state's evidence on that useless man in return for probation instead of hard time. She alone had made the decision not to rat out the bastard and to trust that the jury would see in her the misguided but innocent woman that she really was.

The door opened, and F entered the office.

At once Micky raised her head and opened her eyes, loath to be seen in a humbled posture.

Offering no explanation for her absence, F returned to her desk and settled in her chair without making eye contact. She did glance at Micky's small purse as if nervously wondering whether it contained semi-automatic weapons, spare ammunition, and supplies necessary to endure a long standoff with the police.

"What's the child's name?" F asked.

"Leilani Klonk." Micky spelled both names — and decided not to explain that the surname had evidently been invented by the girl's deranged mother. Leilani s story was complicated enough even when condensed to the bare essentials.

"Do you know her age?"

"She's nine."

"Parents' names?"'

"She lives with her mother and stepfather. The mother calls herself 'Sinsemilla." Micky spelled it.,

"What do you mean—'calls herself?"

"Well, it can't be her real name."

"Why not?" F asked, staring at the keyboard on which her poised, fingers waited to dance.

"It's the name of a really potent type of weed."

F seemed baffled. "Weed?"

"You know — pot, grass, marijuana."

"No." F plucked a Kleenex from a box, blotted her sweat-damped neck. "No, I don't know. I wouldn't. My worst addiction is coffee."

Feeling as though she had just been judged and convicted again, Micky strove to keep her voice calm and her response measured: "I don't do drugs. I never have." Which was true.

"I'm not a policeman, Ms. Bellsong. You don't have to worry about me. I'm only interested in the welfare of this girl."

For F to bring to the case a crusader's determination, she had to believe Micky, and to believe Micky, she had to feel a connection between them. At the moment, they seemed to have nothing in common except that they were women, but shared gender alone didn't generate even the most feeble current of sisterhood.

In prison she had learned that the subject in which dissimilar women most easily found common ground was men. And with some women, sympathy could be earned most quickly when you mocked men and their pretension. So Micky said, "A lot of guys have told me dope expands your consciousness, but judging by them, it just makes you stupid."

Finally F looked away from the computer. "Leilani must know her mother's real name."

F's face and eyes were as unreadable as those of a mannequin. This studied vacancy and refusal to be charmed conveyed more contempt than might have been seen in the most vivid expression of disdain.

"No," Micky said. "Leilani never heard her called anything but Sinsemilla. The woman's superstitious about names. She thinks knowing someone's true name gives you power over them."

"She told you this herself?"

"Leilani told me, yeah."

"I mean the mother."

"I've never exactly spoken to the mother."

"Since you're here to report her for child endangerment of one kind or another, may I assume you've at least met her?"

Quickly plugging the dam of anger that sprang a leak in response to F's rebuke, Micky said, "Met her once, yeah. She was real strange, doped to the eyeballs. But I think there's also—"

"Do you have a last name for the mother," F asked, returning her attention to the computer, "or is it just Sinsemilla?"

"Her married name is Maddoc. M-a-d-d-o-c."

Flatly, absent the slightest note of accusation, F asked, "Do you have a history with her?"

"Excuse me? History?"

"Are you related to her, perhaps by marriage?"

A bead of sweat slid down Micky's left temple. She blotted it with her hand. "Like I said, I just met her once."

"Ever dated anyone she's dated, fought over a boyfriend, been involved with an ex-spouse of hers — any prior history she'd be sure to bring up when I talk to her? Because everything comes out in the open sooner or later, I assure you, Ms. Bellsong."

The cats watched Micky, and Micky stared at F, and F appeared to be prepared to gaze forever at her computer.

The ignorant, cruel, and stupid people to whom F had referred earlier, the rabble that motivated her to paper her walls with cat posters, now included Micky. Maybe it was the prison record that put Micky in this category. Maybe it was an offense she had given without intention. Maybe it was just a matter of bad chemistry. Whatever the reason, she was on F's list now, and she knew the woman well enough to suspect that F made her list with a pencil that had no eraser.

Finally, Micky said, "No. Nothing personal between Leilani's mother and me. I'm just worried about the girl, that's all."

"The father's name?"

"Preston."

F's face at last became marginally more expressive than the screen in front of her, and she looked at Micky again. "You don't mean the Preston Maddoc."

"I guess he is. I'd never heard of him until last night."

Eyebrows arched, F said, "You'd never heard of Preston Maddoc?"

"I haven't had a chance to read up on him yet. According to Leilani. well, I don't know, but I guess he must've been accused of murdering some people, but he got away with it somehow."

The light texture of surprise in F's face quickly smoothed away under the trowel of bureaucratic neutrality, but the caseworker was not entirely able to soften her voice, which cut with a honed edge of disapproval: "He was acquitted, Ms. Bellsong. Not guilty in two separate trials. That isn't the same as 'getting away with it.' "

Micky found herself on the edge of her seat again, hunched in that supplicatory posture once more, but she didn't straighten her shoulders this time or slide back on the chair. She licked her lips, discovered they were salty from perspiration. She felt as if she'd been basted. "Ms. Bronson, I don't know about him being acquitted, but I do know there's a little girl who's been through a lot in her life, and now she's stuck in this godawful situation, and someone has to help. Whatever Maddoc was supposed to have done, maybe he didn't do it, all right, but Leilani had an older brother, and he's gone missing. And if she's right, if Preston Maddoc killed her brother, then her life is on the line, too. And I believe her, Ms. Bronson. I think you'd believe her, too."

"Killed her brother?"

"Yes, ma'am. That's what she says."

"So she's a witness to a murder?"

"No, she didn't actually see it. She—"

"If she didn't actually see it, how does she actually know it happened?"

Counting on patience to prevail, Micky said, "Maddoc took the boy away and then came back without him. He—" > “Took him away where?"

“Into the woods. They were…”

"Woods? Not very much in the way of woods around here."

"Leilani says this was in Montana. Some UFO contact site—"

"UFO?" Like a nest-building bird worrying threads from a scrap of fabric, F seemed determined to pick relentlessly at Micky's story, though not with the intention of building anything, seemingly for the sheer pleasure of reducing it to a scattering of scrambled fibers. In the service of this goal, she seized upon the mention of UFOs. Her eyes sharpened a hawk glare fit to pin a mouse from a thousand feet; and if she'd had slightly less self-control, her next two words would have come out as a birdy screak of cold delight. "Flying saucers?"

"Mr. Maddoc is a UFO buff. Alien contact, that weird stuff—"

"Since when? Seems if this were true, the media would've made a lot out of it. Don't you think? They're pretty merciless, the press."

"According to Leilani, he was into this UFO stuff since at least back when he married her mother. Leilani says—"

"Have you asked Mr. Maddoc directly about the boy?"

"No. What would be the point?"

"So you're operating entirely on the word of a child, are you?"

"Don't you often do the same in your line of work? Anyway, I've never met him."

"You've never met Mr. Maddoc? Never met him or the mother—"

"Like I told you, I met the mother once. She was so high, she was bumping her head on the moon. She probably wouldn't even remember meeting me."

"You saw her actually taking drugs?"

"I didn't have to see her take them. She was saturated. They were virtually squirting out her pores. You ought to remove Leilani from that home if only because her mother's wrecked half the time."

On F's phone, the intercom beeped, but the receptionist didn't say anything. Another beep. Like an oven timer: The goose is cooked.

"Be right back," F promised, and again she left the room. Micky wanted to tear the cat posters off the walls. Instead, she hooked a finger in the scooped neck of her pleated shell, pulled it away from her body, and blew down the front of her blouse, on her breasts. She wanted to take off her suit jacket, but somehow it seemed that to remove it would put her at an even greater disadvantage with F. Bronson. The caseworker's black outfit, in this heat, seemed to be an endurance challenge to visitors.

'This time F was out of the office only briefly. Returning to her desk, she said, "So tell me about the missing brother."

Warning herself to check her anger but not able entirely to heed her own counsel, Micky said, "So did you call off the SWAT team?"

"Excuse me?"

"You checked to see if I'm an escapee."

Unruffled, not in the least embarrassed, F met her eyes. "You'd have done the same in my position. There was no offense intended."

"That's not how it looks from my perspective," Micky replied, dismayed to hear herself pressing for an unnecessary confrontation.

"With all due respect, Ms. Bellsong, I don't live from your perspective."

A slap in the face couldn't have been more to the point. Micky burned with humiliation.

If F had been gazing at the computer, Micky might have snapped back at her. But in the woman's eyes, she saw a chilly contempt that was a match for her hot anger, obstinacy as unyielding as cold stone.

Of all the caseworkers she might have drawn, she'd been brought head-to-head with this one, as though the Fates were amused by the prospect of two women butting like a pair of rams.

Leilani. She had a duty to Leilani.

Swallowing enough anger and pride to ensure that she would still have no appetite by dinnertime, Micky pleaded, "Let me tell you about the girl's situation. And the brother. Straight through, beginning to end, instead of questions and answers."

"Give it a try," F said curtly.

Micky condensed Leilani's story but also censored from it the most outrageous details that might give F an excuse to dismiss the whole tale as fiction.

Even as she listened to this Reader's Digest version, F grew restive. She expressed her impatience by shifting constantly in her chair, by repeatedly picking up a legal pad as though she intended to make notes but replacing it on her desk without writing a word.

Each time that Preston Maddoc was mentioned, F's brow pleated.

Delicate lines tightened as though they were threads tugged by a needle, forming plicated fans of skin at the corners of her eyes, sewing her lips together as if with fine-draw stitches. Evidently she disapproved of the suggestion that Maddoc might be a murderer, and her disapproval was a subtle seamstress at work in her face.

Her dislike of Micky couldn't entirely explain her attitude. She seemed to hold some brief for Maddoc, and though she didn't argue on his behalf, her opinion of him appeared to be beyond reconsideration.

When Micky finished, F said, "If you believe there's been a murder, why would you come here instead of going to the police?"

The truth was complicated. For one thing, two cops had stretched the facts in her arrest, suggesting she'd been more than a companion to the document forger, that she'd been an accomplice, and the public defender appointed to her case by the court had been too overworked or too incompetent to correct this misrepresentation before the jury. She'd had enough of the police for a while. And she didn't entirely trust the system. Furthermore, she knew that the local authorities would not be eager to investigate a report of a murder in a far jurisdiction when they had plenty of homegrown crime to keep them busy. She couldn't claim to have known Lukipela. Her accusation was based on her faith in Leilani, and though she was convinced the cops also would find the girl credible, her own testimony was hearsay.

She kept her reply succinct: "Luki's disappearance has to be investigated eventually, sure, but right now the issue is Leilani, her safety. You don't have to wait for the cops to prove Luki was murdered before you can protect Leilani. She's alive now, in trouble now, so it seems to me that her situation has to be addressed first."

Eschewing comment, turning to her computer once more, F typed for two or three minutes. She might have been entering a version of Micky's statement or she might have been composing an official report and closing out the file without further action.

Beyond the window, the day looked fiery. A nearby palm tree wore a ruffled collar of dead brown fronds. California burning.

When she stopped typing and turned to Micky again, F said, "One more question, if you don't mind. You may consider it too personal to answer, and of course you're under no obligation."

Wary, applying a smile no more sincere than lipstick, Micky hoped that the.machinery of Child Protective Services would get the job done in spite of how badly this interview had gone. "What is it?"

"Did you find Jesus in jail?"

"Jesus?"

"Jesus, Allah, Buddha, Vishnu, L. Ron Hubbard. Lots of people find religion behind bars."

"What I hope I found there was direction, Ms. Bronson. And more common sense than I went in with."

"People take up lots of things in prison that are pretty much religions, even if they aren't recognized as such," the caseworker said. "Extreme political movements, left-wing and right-wing, some of them race-based, most with a grudge against the world."

"I don't have a grudge against anyone."

"I'm sure you realize why I'm curious."

"Frankly, no."

F clearly doubted Micky's denial. "We both know Preston Maddoc inspires hatred from various factions, both religious and political."

"Actually I don't know. I really don't know who he is."

F ignored this protestation. "Lots of people who're usually at odds with one another are united on Maddoc. They want to destroy him just because they disagree with him philosophically."

Even with her bottomless reservoir of anger to draw upon, Micky wasn't able to pump up any rage at the accusation that philosophical motives drove her to character assassination. She almost laughed. "Hey, my philosophy is to make as few waves as possible, get through the day, and maybe find a little happiness in something that won't land you in a mess of trouble. That's as deep as I get."

"All right then," said F. "Thank you for coming in."

The caseworker turned to the computer.

A long moment passed before Micky realized that she'd been dismissed. She didn't get up. "You'll send someone out there?"

"It's got a case number now. There has to be follow-through."

"Today?"

F looked up from the computer, not at Micky but at one of the posters: a fluffy white cat wearing a red Santa hat and sitting in snow. "Not today, no. There's no physical or sexual abuse involved. The child isn't at immediate risk."

Feeling as though she had failed completely to be understood, Micky said, "But he's going to kill her."

Gazing wistfully at the cat, as if she wished she could crawl into the poster with it, trading the California meltdown for a white Christmas, F said, "Assuming the girl's story isn't a fantasy, you said he'll kill her on her birthday, which isn't until February."

"By her birthday," Micky corrected. "Maybe next February— maybe next week. Tomorrow's Friday. I mean, you don't work on weekends, and if you don't get out there today or tomorrow, they might be gone."

F's stare was so fixed, her eyes so glazed, that she appeared to be meditating on the image of the cat.

The caseworker was a psychic black hole. In her vicinity, you could feel your emotional energy being sucked away.

"Their motor home is being overhauled," Micky persisted, though she felt drained, enervated. "The mechanic might finish at any time."

With a sigh, F snatched two Kleenex from the box and blotted her forehead carefully, trying to spare her makeup. When she threw the tissues in the waste can, she seemed surprised to see that Micky hadn't left. "What time did you say you had a job interview?"

Short of sitting here until security was called to remove her, which wouldn't accomplish anything, Micky had no choice but to get up and move toward the door. "Three o'clock. I can make it easily."

"Was it in prison you learned all about software applications?"

Although the caseworker looked harmless behind a heretofore unseen smile, Micky expected that the question had been prelude to another insult. "Yeah. They have a good program up there."

"How're you finding the job market these days?"

This appeared to be the first genuine woman-to-woman contact since Micky entered the office. "They all say the economy's sliding."

"People suck in the best of times," said K

Micky had no idea how she ought to respond to that.

"In this market," F said with something that sounded vaguely like sisterly concern, "you have to go into a job interview perfect — all pluses, no minuses. If I were you, I'd take another look at the way you're dressing for it. The clothes don't do what you want."

This coral-pink suit with the pleated white shell was the nicest outfit in Micky's closet.

As though she'd read that thought, F said, "It's not because the suit's from Kmart, or wherever it's from. That doesn't matter. But the skirt's too short, too tight, and with all the cleavage you've got, don't wear a scoop-necked blouse. Honey, this country's full of greedy trial lawyers, which makes you look like you're trying to sucker some executive into making a pass so you can slam his company with a sexual-harassment suit. When personnel directors see you, it doesn't matter if they're men or women, what they see is trouble, and they're full up on trouble these days. If you have time to change before that interview, I'd recommend it. Don't look so… obvious."

F's black-hole gravity drew Micky toward oblivion.

Maybe the advice about clothes was well meant. Maybe it wasn't. Maybe she thanked F for her counsel. Maybe she didn't. One moment she was in the office, and an instant later she stood outside; the door was closed, yet she had no memory of having crossed the threshold.

Whatever she'd said or not said as she'd left the room, she was sure she'd done nothing to alienate F further or to harm Leilani's chances of getting help. Nothing else mattered. Not her own dreams, not her pride, at least not here, not now.

As before, just four chairs in the reception lounge. Seven people waiting instead of the previous five.

The corridor seemed hotter than the office.

Hotter than hot, the elevator broiled. Pressure built during the descent, as though Micky were aboard a bathysphere, dropping into an oceanic trench. She placed one hand against the wall, half expecting to feel the metal panel buckling beneath her palm.

She almost wished that her quenched anger would flare up again, raw and hot, balancing the summer heat with that inner fire, because what took its place was a quiet desperation too much like despair.

On the ground floor, she located the public restrooms. Warm, oily nausea crawled the walls of her stomach, and she feared that she might throw up.

The stall doors stood open. The room was deserted. Privacy.

Harsh fluorescent light bounced off white surfaces, ricocheted from the mirrors. The icy impression couldn't chill the hot reality.

She turned on the cold water at one of the sinks and held her upturned wrists under the flow. Closed her eyes. Took slow, deep breath. The water wasn't cold enough, but it helped.

When at last she'd dried her hands, she turned to a full-length mirror on the wall next to the paper-towel dispenser. Leaving home, she'd thought that she was dressed to make the right impression, that she appeared businesslike, efficient. She'd thought she looked nice.

Now her reflection mocked her. The skirt was too short. And too tight. Though not shockingly low-cut, the blouse nevertheless looked inappropriate for a job interview. Maybe the heels on her white shoes were too high, as well.

She did look obvious. Cheap. She looked like the woman she had been, not like the woman she wanted to be. She wasn't dressing for herself or for work, but for men, and for the type of men who never treated her with respect, for the type of men who ruined her life. Somehow the mirror at home hadn't shown her what she needed to see.

This pill was bitter, but more bitter still was the way that it had been administered. By F. Bronson.

Though difficult, taking such advice from someone who respected you and cared for you would be like swallowing medicine with honey. This dosage came with vinegar. And if F. Bronson had thought of it as medicine, instead of poison, she might not have given it.

For years, in mirrors Micky had seen the good looks and the sexual magnetism that could get anything she desired. But now that she no longer wanted those things, now that parties and thrills and the attention of bad men held no appeal, now that she harbored higher aspirations, the mirror revealed cheap flash, awkwardness, naivete— and a desperate yearning, the sight of which made her cringe.

She'd thought that she had merely grown beyond the need to use her beauty as either a tool or a weapon, but something more profound had happened. Her concept of beauty had changed entirely; and when she looked in the mirror, she saw frighteningly little that matched her new definition. This might be maturity, but it scared her; always before, her confidence in her physical beauty was something to fall back on, an ultimate consolation in bad times. Now that confidence was gone.

An urge to shatter the mirror overcame her. But the past could not be broken as easily as glass. It was the past that stood before her, the stubborn past, relentless.