Chapter 33
Laine
Phoebe was in Las Vegas to see a client, but she promised to get back by morning. She gave me the number of a colleague, but they didn’t pick up.
The lady in the blue sweater said I didn’t have to talk to her until my moral support showed up, which pissed me off. I was a grown woman and didn’t need backup. She kept treating me like a victim, incapable of consenting to anything. As if my being a little older would have changed my ability to make a decision about who could stick what inside me. I’d consented to the sex. Yes, I’d hated it, but I consented. And I consented to the pictures, and yes, I hated that more, but I consented.
“We may find they were distributed over the internet,” she said softly.
“I didn’t consent to that,” I said, crossing and uncrossing my legs. My stockings had started sagging, and I felt out of place, with my fancy pink dress, in a room decked out in jeweled colors and decorated with the alphabet. An indoor play structure sat in one corner, and in another was a child-sized white table stacked with anatomically correct dolls.
“Miss Cartwright, we can prosecute a distributor of child pornography whether you consent or not.”
“So do it. Just not Michael. Hang Jake out to dry. I don’t care.”
She handed me papers, and they all had the word victim on them. I wouldn’t sign them. I wouldn’t even look at them. Before I could shove them up her ass, there was a knock on the door.
A man stuck his head in. “Your family’s here.”
I didn’t waste a minute before walking out to the lobby. Tom was there, his monochrome face in a room that finally matched him. Irving had shown up like a beat-up knight on an old brokeback horse, so quickly that traffic must have parted before him. I didn’t know what family meant to me until they came when I needed them. I was so surprised and relieved to see them, I hugged them both so hard I thought I’d break them.
“He didn’t do anything,” I said after the first greeting. “He was trying to get them so we could burn them. And I keep telling them that, but they won’t let him go.”
“I shouldn’t have developed them,” Tom said.
“You saved my life. If you hadn’t put them under my nose, I don’t know what would have happened to me.”
“Yeah, well. I came to see you, but also…” He rolled his eyes, indicating the room at large. “Gotta tell them my side.”
“They wouldn’t put you away for it,” I said with an edge of desperation.
“I was a year younger than you, dorkhead.”
“Still are,” Irving said. “Go talk to the fuzz and get it over with.” He nudged Tom toward the sign-in desk then pulled me to a plastic chair.
“Can we not, I don’t know, talk about this?” I said.
“Sure.” He picked a magazine off the little linoleum table. “Personally, what you did when you were fifteen is your own business. Are they letting you go?”
“I guess I can go any time. I have to sign some stuff, but I want to wait for Michael.”
“You like him.”
I nodded. “If anyone else had gotten picked up for this, we’d laugh about it in a week, but him? This could hurt him, so I have to make sure we look like a united front. You know, so the public knows I’m not mad at him or anything.”
“Speaking of the public, they’re waiting outside. Your peers, I mean.” He licked his finger and flipped a page of celebrity news. “I’m going to ask the obvious. How do you like being on the other side of it?”
I looked over his shoulder at the magazine. Britt with a roller in her hair. Brad wearing white in winter. Fiona with ice cream on her shirt.
“What should I do?” I asked.
“I don’t think there’s a precedent for this, so do whatever you have to. Do whatever is right.”
We sat there another few minutes. Tom waved as they led him to a room to tell the story of his forgotten camera and an exposed roll of film. Irving didn’t ask about the pictures, and I tried not to think of them being distributed. I hoped that they hadn’t been. I didn’t know how I’d function if people knew.
Yet it seemed foolish to hide. If they were out, they were out. I wasn’t that girl anymore. She was scared and lonely, sensitive and breakable. I’d broken her and put her back together, myself.
Just me.
And Irv.
And Tom.
And Hollywood.
I wasn’t that girl anymore, but I loved her.
Why shouldn’t she have a voice in all this? Why should I leave it to Michael’s machine and the police? Hadn’t that girl been silenced long enough?
I took a deep breath and stood.
Irving looked up at me. “What’s on your mind?”
I didn’t answer, because I didn’t want to be talked out of it. I knew what Irving would say. He’d say I didn’t know what I was doing. He’d say I was being impulsive and that I’d get in trouble. So I walked out the door without saying anything.
I was still in last night’s dress. The shawl had gotten lost somewhere. Michael’s house, or the police car, or any of the ten rooms I’d been shuffled between. Didn’t matter.
They saw me through the glass door, and twenty of them called my name, their faces obliterated behind flashes and cameras. There was a video camera among them—I could tell by the constant flare from the left. Fill lights on such a cloudy day would keep the pictures from being flat. Toby or Franco were behind the fill if I had my guess. I pushed the door open and stood on the precinct steps alone in my pink dress. I folded my hands in front of me and stared into the lights. Clickclickclick a tempo in unexpected rhythms, like fusion jazz.
“Hi,” I said.
“Hi, Miss Cartwright,” a few said in unison like a third-grade class.
I laughed, remembering that I liked my job and I liked those guys. I got them. I shielded my eyes from the lights. “Who’s got the vid rig?”
“Me,” a voice shouted.
I recognized the accent. “Franco! Hi! Renaldo? You there?”
“Right here!” came a voice in the front.
I saw his bald head shining and waved. “Take your strobe down. It’s not that cloudy.”
Laughter.
“Laine!” shouted a voice I recognized as Bart’s. “What’s happening with Michael? Did he buy kiddie porn?”
“Technically?”
“Come on!” Renaldo said, adjusting his dials. “What else is there?”
“He was protecting the person in the pictures, guys. You know him. You’ve worked with him. He’s not a pedophile.”
Another voice piped in before I even finished. Kyle? Lennart? “You the moral support?”
What was it about being in front of those cameras that made me feel peeled open? I couldn’t tell whether it was that I knew the men behind them or the universal desire to be seen and loved, but I wanted to answer what was asked so that it could be known finally. I felt the power to protect myself and him in just a few words. I could finish all of this nonsense.
“Yeah, Laine? Why are you here?”
“Because I’m the girl in the pictures.”
I didn’t have much else to offer. A bunch of explanations went through my head. In the split second where I decided to reveal more, I felt a hand on my arm. I looked over. A man in his fifties, in a suit, with a perfectly proportioned smile.
He turned to the cameras. “All right, guys. You got your pictures. You’ll know what you need to, when you need to.”
“Thanks, Ken!” Renaldo shouted as everyone put their rigs away.
I was led back into the building by Ken, who didn’t leave me much of a choice. It wasn’t until I was under the cold, hard fluorescents and Ken was in front of me that I lost the sense of control and ownership I’d clung to.
“What was that?” he asked.
Behind him, clusters of men and women in uniform passed by, making him seem as much a part of the system as the cops themselves.
“That was me. Why?”
“People like you keep people like me in a new Ferrari every year.”
I crossed my arms, suddenly cold. “What’s the problem?”
“Now that you told the world there are pornographic pictures of you? What could be the problem?”
“Michael got them.”
“They were digitized. That’s how they got onto your phone. No?”
They’d been crappy photos of photos, but yes. They’d been on my phone, which meant easily distributed. And found. I’d never trusted Jake, so it shouldn’t even be a question that he’d upload the pictures if he could turn a dime off them.
I felt small, weak, and unprotected. I closed my eyes as if no one could see me if I couldn’t see them.
“What should I do?” I whispered into the darkness.
“My job is to protect my client. But a bit of personal advice? If I were you, I’d go home and change out of last night’s dress. And don’t look at the internet.”