Blues In The Closet April Gordon lives alone in downtown L.A -- after an attempted break in to her apartment the police officer, assigned to stay with her until she calms down, advises her to buy a handgun. She tells him that she can't. 1] because she's only 20 years old and 2] because she's afraid she might use it. The officer -- late 30's, shaven head, dark Ray Bans hanging from his breast pocket at 2:00 in the morning -- blithely tells her that age is no problem, he can put her in touch with a discreet source. She's young, has a clean sheet, lives alone and she can always say that it was a present from an ex-boyfriend. 'There's nothing wrong with shooting someone, just make sure you leave him dead. If he lives to testify, he'll say that he just stopped to ask you the way to the planetarium when you blew him away. And don't hang around. Even in the clearest case of self defense, there's a civil suit for wrongful death that will cost a minimum of 80,000.' He leaves her the phone number of the "source", but she's too confused and she files it for the time being. A few days later the news reports that 2 girls her age were raped and murdered in the park less than 2 blocks from her apartment. She finds the number of the "source"and sets up an appointment to meet with his mobile market at 10:30 in an alley way down town. He is also a cop with a sideline business selling confiscated weapons that for one reason or another never made it into bureaucratic channels. She is astounded by the selection on display in the back of his van. He sets her up with a neat little .38 with a grip that fits almost too naturally into her hand. He explains that it belonged to the girlfriend of some drug dealer they had busted 6 months prior and, of course, it had never been registered. He also gives her the address of a private gun club where the off duty cops cool out. For $50, plus the cost of ammunition, he promises that he will have her shooting like a pro in a few months. In a compact time lapse sequence, we see her go from trembling beginner to cold dead on accuracy. She 'graduates' the night of her 21st birthday. The "guys" present her with a shoulder holster and she buys the first round at a local hangout. The whole atmosphere has seduced her---the feeling of having joined a fraternity---the feeling of invincibility that comes from carrying a deadly weapon and knowing how to use it. In the beginning, she's conservative. It's still early fall, too warm for jackets and the bulk of the holster is just too obvious under a light suit. As the holidays draw near, however, she's wearing it every time she goes out of the house. It's become part of her identity, her being. Without it, she feels naked, vulnerable, almost as though there were no one there at all. She gradually loses contact with her buddies from the gun club. At first she went once a week to keep her form, but now the demands of her job make her unavailable during the hours that the club convenes. There is one exception: Jesus (call him Jesse, it makes him happy)\Alvaro. He's stationed in her precinct. He passes by occasionally to check on her, she baby sits for him and his wife, attends their BBQ's and so on. The relationship feels like brother and sister. He can share with her the details about the beat he doesn't want to tell his wife and she confides in him her frustrations and asks advice in dealing with the scumbags she has to face on her way up the professional ladder. For her company's New Year's Eve party she buys herself a very sexy strapless gown. The only problem is that her shoulder holster does not make an attractive accessory and the .38 is just a little too big for her matching clutch purse. She looks up a custom gun store and goes shopping for a solution. It just happens that the sales manager is one of the boys from the club and he sets her up with a thigh holster, the kind undercover police women use on vice assignments. After her lingerie she straps on the .38, admiring her reflection in a full length mirror. She practices walking. It feels a little awkward at first, but she quickly adjusts her stride to accommodate it. When she is fully dressed she admires herself once again. Her appearance is delicate, totally feminine, but her secret brings a satisfied smile to her lips, an arrogance to her bearing. At the party one of her coworkers flirts with her throughout the evening and her attitude is quite cavalier. When she is ready to leave he offers to follow her home --for her protection, of course. She acknowledges the nice try , but insists that she can take care of herself. On the way home she stops at an all night supermarket for milk and cat food. Parked outside is a tan-gold Volkswagen, half in the shadows. The man behind the wheel watches her with sick intensity as she steps out of her car and enters the store. POV pulls in on the man. He s in civilian clothes, but he car is an unmarked police vehicle. He radios her license number to dispatch. The operator asks him why the Hell he isn't home with his feet up and half drunk. He excuses himself saying that he s on the way, but just happened to see some kids messing with a car. CUT TO: The dispatch operator. She fills out the standard form for the call, stating date, time, location and the name of the officer calling in. CUT TO: The man in the Volkswagen as April s name and address comes over the radio. Long Shot: April comes out of the store as the Volkswagen pulls away. As she pulls up to her building she passes the Volks on the street: He is not in the car. She activates the automatic garage door and slowly pulls inside. He runs alongside the car s blind spot and the door closes behind them. Her building is one of the achingly modern high rises near the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion; the parking garage is vast and almost empty -- it's 12:30 on a Saturday night. She pulls into her space and, with grocery sack and purse in hand, she heads for the elevator. Suddenly, she realizes that her foot steps are echoing too heavily. She stops, hears a shuffle behind her and drops her things to hide behind a pillar. Hands shaking, she fumbles with her skirt to get at her gun. The man walks slowly toward her fallen groceries, the confident predator. "It's O.K., April, I wont hurt you, unless you want me to." April panics at the sound of her name. "Who...who are you? What do you want from me?" "You strike me as a pretty sophisticated lady, Miss Gordon, I think you can figure it out." CU on April's face. She's pale. She clutches the gun in both hands, but her hands wont stop trembling. She takes a deep breath, clenches her teeth and steps out from behind the column. "Dont come any closer." He stops for a moment laughs. He walks toward her again, but much more slowly, proceeding one step at a time. In diplomacy it's called salami tactics. "Nice piece, daddy buy you that for Xmas? Bet he forgot to tell you: never pull a gun unless you intend to use it. Is it even loaded?" He laughs again. His ridicule enrages her and with her rage her voice and hands become steady. "I said stop. One more step and you'll find out if it's loaded or not." This time he doubles over laughing, but as he does so his hand dives to the small of his back. She catches the movement and before he can bring up his gun, she cuts loose wildly, severing his left carotid artery. Blood spurts 15 feet and pinwheels around the room as he tries to regain his balance. He fires a shot or 2 on reflex then stops. He looks surprised, people who just got shot always do, even betrayed. then all of himgoes limp at once and he falls back onto the concrete floor. In her apartment she dials Jesse, her voice falters as she tries to explain what happened. He speeds to her building without calling it in. They descend together into the garage. On the way down she explains to him in detail what happened, MOS, and he hugs her. At the sight of the body and the action painting of blood around the walls, she gets nauseous fast. He approaches the body then stops in his tracks as soon as he sees the face. He knew the guy. He looks from the body to April and shakes his head. Her panic is renewed. "What? What is it?!" "This is bad, kid. He was a cop." In custody, the cops dont want to believe her. They interrogate her over and over trying to get her to change her story. Jesse keeps his distance, he's afraid to take her side against the other cops and he's beginning to have doubts about April's story. He and his wife have a fight, how can he stand by and let the poor girl be railroaded, but she killed a cop, he cant start an open investigation of a fellow officer without being seen as a traitor to the shield. She awaits her bail hearing. He visits her on some pretext. She is bitter and scared. They have humiliated her, going so far as to suggest she picked him up in a bar and had him follow her home. Bail is set at $500,000. There is no way she can make the bond, her company has suspended her indefinitely ending a verdict, her rent is past due and her building is trying to evict her. Even if she could make bail, where would she go? At the women's correctional facility where she is being held pending trial she is looked on by the other inmates with a sort of awe, she killed a cop, but for the same reason they all keep their distance, she is taboo and that suits her just fine. She is visited by her attorney and Jesse's wife. Jesse himself won't come. What he does do is access the dispatch records from the dead man's precinct for the night of the shooting. He finds the report from the 'vandalism call', the same time as April's supermarket receipt, and with April's license plate number. But there was no vandalism to her car. The whole thing stinks. It looks like he was stalking her. He cross references other similar calls with the other unsolved rape/murder cases and discovers 2 in the same precinct over the last year and a half. He talks to the prosecutor, but cant get him interested. "What the hell was he doing in her garage at midnight?" "They were having an affair and trying to keep it a secret. He refused to leave his wife, that's why she shothim." "He wasn't married." "He told her that he was. His fellow officers will testify to that." "Then it's a crime of passion, break it down to manslaughter and she's out in 2 years." "I might. I might, if she offered to plead guilty to a lesser charge, but her lawyer tells me that she still insists that she's innocent." "Maybe, because she is." "Irrelevant and you know it." "It's an unlicensed gun, that's 3 to 5 and she's out in a year and a half." "It could be argued successfully that the garage is an extension of her homeand that makes it a misdemeanor. I am not going to throw this case away. There would be no way to explain it." "She's innocent. That would explain it." "But I can prove she's guilty." 'His fellow officers are lying." "Police officers perjure themselves all the time, we can't get a conviction if they don't. You of all people ought to understand that." Jesse and the prosecutor share a guilty secret. He arranges a clandestine meeting with April's attorney and gives him the information, insisting that the source remain anonymous. The lawyer is strangely uncomfortable with the idea of winning the case and becomes evasive. "Inadmissible evidence." "That is straight off the cop computer!, it doesn't get more authoritative than that." "No, it is not. These are printouts made by you. By the rule of best evidence, it's inadmissible unless you take the stand and testify that these are exact copies of the original." "There's got to be some way to get it in There's always an angle, that's what lawyers are for." "Well, according to Wigmore on Evidence, it can't be used on direct. It can be used in rebuttal to refute someone's testimony." "There you are." "No, I'm not. The men testifying are police officers, I cant accuse them of perjury." "You can prove it." "That's the problem. I will not offend the police in this manner. They have too many ways of making my life miserable." "You sound like you're afraid to win this case." "Damn right, I am." "I'll subpoena the records for her, then you have no choice." "The man was a cop so, you cant without filing an official complaint. Are you prepared to do that? I will not sacrifice myself for this woman. You're the one in love with her, if anyone is to be sacrificed, it's going to be you." Jesse is caught in a Catch-22. Cop or not, this man was responsible for at least 3 rapes and murders, but to come forward against a fellow officer is a different kettle of worms entirely. Not only would he have to leave the force, he'd have to leave the state. Even that might not be enough. There are charges that could be made against him that were covered up in the same way. Not rape or murder, but breaches of the rules that could send him to jail. "One thing I can do is write a letter to the Bar Association saying that you threw the case and I can prove it. None of this shit about admissible, inadmissible. Even an anonymous letter can get you disbarred." "Perhaps I reconsider." As the trial date nears, the defense case has hardly progressed. April's lawyer calls in a favor with a downtown judge tosubpoena the dispatch report for the night of the shooting. He cant get the others yet the dead officer is not on trial. However, when the report is given to him, there is no record of such a call. If he hadn't the copy Jesse had given to him, he wouldn't have known it happened and Jesse won't testify. His only hope is to contact the dispatcher who as on duty that night, but her attitude is evasive, dictated by the usual mixture of misplaced loyalty, fear and the belief that if you ignore a problem long enough, it will go away. It's the dead man's buddies that are erasing the paper trail, anything that hurts one cop's reputation hurts them all. Everything from his home precinct is gone, hard copy included. Jesse finds the same pattern in 2 other precincts, but there's still no way to get the evidence in without testifying himself. When things seemed to reach a total standstill, a woman's group comes forward. They've managed to raise April's bail. A member of the group, a young woman April's age who was sexually harassed by a law enforcement officer but (alas) had no witnesses to prove it, takes April to her apartment. The two become friends, the girl telling April, "It's a job like being a whore, you're dealing with people at their worst and eventually it has to get to your head. And then you give them a gun and tell them they can shoot anyone they want and what do you expect?" Suddenly there's a change. The dispatcher contacts April's attorney and agrees to testify, but she must be promised protection because she fears for her life and April's. It might be just enough to turn the case in her favor, to get a postponement pending further investigation. The trial is scheduled to begin right after a three day weekend. Jesse tells her to get away and out of sight for those 3 days: The battle between the Good and the Bad might turn Ugly. She rents a car and books a bungalow in Santa Barbara for the weekend. She invites Jesse and his wife to come, but Jesse is on duty. While Jesse is at the station, an officer stops by his house. Jesse's wife knows him by sight from departmental functions and all that. She invites him in for coffee and in the course of conversation they happen to discus the impending case. The officer asks how she happens to know so much and she tells him that she knew the girl before all this happened. Then he sees the note pad next to the phone. It says: April...Biltmore S.B. 805-555-9680. CUT TO: That night there's a meeting of 3 cops including the one that visited Jesse's wife. "This is out of control. We cant keep the lid on this. We shouldn't have tried to save his reputation." "But we did and you got to run all the way with that basket of eggs and yez wonders why yez gets suspended. Unless, of course, yez want to compete as to who can sell out who first." "Sooner or later, someone is going to remember That you can't erase the computer file. Because there's back up to the back up on the back up. And you cant get at it. There are physical locks on it. It would take a military operation already. And when they recover the record they'll find that we tried to erase it---with our log on numbers. I dont know whose idea that was, but we've got to do something about it now." "That's why we got to take care of this Gordon woman. She supposedly goes away for the weekend to rest up for the trial, but actually jumps bail, disappears..." "That's your solution to every problem." "That's everyone's solution to every problem: Just kill a few more people and the world will be perfect." "You got any better ideas?" "No." CUT TO: April awakens in her Biltmore bungalow and heads for a stroll on the beach. It is a perfect southern California morning. CUT TO: Jesse's house. He gets home at about 3 am from his long second shift. He is exhausted. He asks his wife if anything happened. She says no, but later remembers the visit the previous day from the officer. Jesse asks his name, then tells her that it was one of the dead man's friends. "Where's April's number?" He sees it lying on the coffee table next to the phone. "Was this here yesterday when he came in?" His wife nods, he curses under his breath and dials frantically. The Biltmore receptionist informs him that there is no answer in her room. He tells his wife to call April's attorney and tell him that she is in danger and that he in on the way to Santa Barbara. CUT TO: April walks alone to the farthest end of Butterfly beach. It is still very early. She is basically alone except for a jogger and his dog. She takes off herclothes and walks naked into the cold Pacific. CUT TO: Jesse is watching her from the road. He stares at her like a Hunky immigrant getting his first look at the Statue of Liberty. CUT TO: From a phone booth in the lobby one of the officers calls the reception desk. He goes out and consults the other two. "Well, it looks like a stake out, one in reception, I'll take the front, I'll take the van." They take their positions and wait. When he sees April walking toward the main entrance, he radios the others to get ready. He pulls the van up to the main entrance. The idea is to open the side door and shove her inside before she realizes what is happening. But there's a man with her. There is a little too much distance between them. Apparently just had a fight and, at first, it's not clear that they're together. Then the man puts his arm around her waist and she doesn't object. The man is Jesse. The officer gets on the radio again, but this time he's getting no cooperation. Jesse is a cop and the other two refuse to kill him no matter what kind of argument they get. He abandons the van and runs to April's bungalow. He picks the lock in a matter of seconds and waits inside. He hears voices coming. Jesse is still with her. He tries to retreat, but there's no place to hide except the bathroom and that's not apt to help much. Finally, he jumps into the closet just before Jesse and April enter the room. And they are arguing. She is furious. "So all you're really saying is that you want to get laid." "No, I am no saying that. I believe in the sanctity of marriage. I am faithful to my wife and I will not betray her trust." "Blow it out your tiny fur covered ass. It's your loyalty to the shield that's the problem. If we were sleeping together, your primary loyalty would be to me, not to other cops. Or do I read you wrong? "It's not that simple." "All you've been saying all along is that, if I sleep with you, you'll agree to save my life! No, you haven't been saying it, but that's the implication. That's rape under threat of death!" And with that, she hits him with a straight arm roundhouse swing. He goes straight over backward on to the bed. He covers his eye and says: "That punch has been illegal in boxing since 1903." She jumps on top of him and starts ripping his pants off. He's dazed, but fights back until she catches him with an elbow under the chin and makes him bite deep into his tongue. She gets his pants down and smirks to see that he's already erect. She swings a leg over him and climbs on. CUT TO: The cop in the closet is fascinated by this. He undoes his zipper and tries to masturbate left handed. That's unsatisfying and he switches to his right. But trying to masturbate and hang on to his gun at the same time, he manages to kill himself. His .357 magnum sounds enormous in the enclosed space. He falls out of the closet dead. Jesse and April stare at each other. April smiles: "Was it good for you too?"
Copyright © 1999 Victoria King |