I engaged the transmission and went forward and swung wide to pull up into my driveway and then back out and turn around. I caught Emli getting into her car with the sweep of my headlights as I swung back out onto the street. I went into reverse to back up and she started her engine and then drove up toward me and mimicked my turnaround in the driveway. She headed down the street and then out on Laurel Canyon ahead of me in her car, a late model mid-size Japanese job which was far different from the Ford Mustang she had when we were together before. I followed at a safe distance, able to see her form silhouetted at the driver’s wheel to the left between the glowing red frame thrown up by her car’s taillights. I settled into following that image before me on the route down Laurel Canyon Boulevard and then east out Sunset Boulevard. Traffic was sparse at that hour and following her was no problem.
We caught mostly green lights and it took no more than twenty minutes for us to drive to her apartment. Motoring along, I evaluated the circumstances as I knew them. There were, I concluded, too many unknowns for me to make a definite call. I had brought the shovel and pick along to address a certain contingency but at this point, I did not even know whether her boyfriend, or ex-boyfriend, was dead. She had said he wasn’t breathing but she might have been mistaken.
If he was alive, this was going to be a whole different can of worms than if he were dead. More than four hours had gone by since he had been wounded and it was going to prove difficult to explain why we had waited so long to seek medical care. Nevertheless, it occurred to me, the guy being alive would represent a whole lot less complication to Emli than if he indeed was dead. Guys that rough up and threaten their girlfriends have a pretty hard time masking that tendency and if the authorities had a chance to experience him up close and personal, she might be able to walk away from all of this.
If he was dead, and I figured he probably was, things were going to turn ugly quick. From what she had said about having driven over to his place intending to scare him and deliberately taking his gun, that would sound too much to a prosecutor like malice aforethought. Throw in the established motive of her anger at the victim and the fact that he had done nothing to threaten her or hurt her immediately prior to the shooting and it added up to First Degree murder. With the right legal representation she might be able to work a plea for manslaughter, but that would put her away for at least a dozen years. And she would no longer be pretty after doing a decade or more of hard time.
I thought over our doctoring options. Maybe the wound would support a finding of suicide, if it was to the head and the gun had been fired from close enough to have left powder burns. I had not asked Emli about that. I would better be able to assess that when I had a look at the scene. Maybe she had a letter from him threatening suicide. That could help.
At the thought of desperate letters addressed to Emli I was thrown into a reverie. I had been exactly where the poor bastard was four years before. I had written her a good dozen myself when she had thrown me over. And her account back at my house of how he had doggedly pursued her in an attempt to get her back had hit a resounding chord in me as well. The memories and emotion of four and five years past flooded over me as I drove, still a safe distance behind the woman who was the subject of my tortured thoughts.
It had been very good, my relationship with Emli, during the 16 months that it had lasted. I see that time now and guess I will always see it as an idyllic pastoral, the true highlight of my life.
It had started out simply enough. She was the secretary to one of my clients. He was the owner of a large studio downtown and he retained me to sue a photographer he had a partnership with who had outright absconded with about $400,000 worth of his equipment and, as near as we were able to determine, the negatives, prints and half tones for about 50,000 photographs that had been taken by other photographers under exclusive contract to my client. This was known because dozens of the photographs which my client had all of the rights to had started turning up in publications all over the country. Emli had been assigned to assist me in gathering documentation during discovery in the lead-up to the trial. We spent several hours a day for more than a week going over documents and files and everything she could locate relating to the partnership. She coordinated with the photographers to get their personal prints of the photographs that had been embezzled. I was practically working out of her office. The first thing that impressed me about her had been the efficiency and competence with which she handled all order of the tasks that were laid out before her. Early on, well before the sheer volume of the materials we were working with had begun to weigh us down, she had already devised a reference and filing system that over the course of the litigation proved invaluable. She was an incredibly quick study and I merely had to explain to her what I was looking for and she had a real knack for reading through volumes of the material to come up with the relevant and probative material I was looking for.
It would have been impossible for me not to have noted from the onset just how physically attractive she was. But somehow at first, I had been able to ignore that, as I am not the kind of guy who goes to pieces over a pretty girl. Besides, I was determined to keep everything on a professional basis while I sought to litigate the matter at hand on behalf of her employer. Within a very short while, however, my resistance had begun to erode. About two weeks after I had taken up the case we were in the studio’s executive office digging through files and ended up staying late. I went out to get Chinese food. We did not get much done in the way of bona fide work that night. Instead, we just sat and talked until about 9 o’clock. The matter had not yet moved to trial when I took her out to dinner for the first time one Friday night, our first proper date. It had gone from there. It should go without saying that I had fallen hopelessly and eternally in love with her. In the beginning I was filled with profound curiosity about her. I was absolutely obsessed with her and everything about her. I wanted to know everything about her – what her earliest memory was, what her parents were like, where she grew up, what kind of dolls she had, all about her best friends, her favorite teachers, where she went on vacation, where she went to college…..
The more I satisfied each level of curiosity, the more obsessed with her I became. I could listen to her for hours. Her voice had for me some type of hypnotic power, its timber and cadence like the elegant music from a faraway land that washed over me and slew the demons that disturbed my soul.
After she had my soul, she stole my body. For every man there must be, or should be, a woman who can unleash his manhood. For me, Emli was that woman.
After previous weekend trips to the Griffith Observatory, the Getty Museum, the Huntington Library and the Norton Simon Museum we drove late one Saturday morning up to Castaic Lake and retreated deep into the forest for a picnic she had packed. After lunch, she incited my passion beyond my ability to restrain it and when I expressed it her voice raced with the furious cadence of her own desire and we devoured each other on her red gingham table cloth.
For the next sixteen months there was hardly a day that we did not revel in the pulse of our being to glide as one across the universe, our senses locked fully engaged upon one another, my surging manhood enveloped by her warm and taut womanhood. At her bidding, I was transformed into a satyr and she gladly let me feast upon her flesh. I worshipped her body as the earthly Temple of Aphrodite.
She lived in a small upstairs apartment then. She gave me the key. I ended up living out of there, a snug neat little place closer to the courthouse than my apartment, three or four days a week. Only the walls stood witness to our displays of passion, encounters that gradually escalated from gentle touches to the full incitement of each other’s lust. I cannot conceive of any other woman being so responsive to my touch as she was and there was no portion of her body that she held off limits to me.
Following or between our hours-long sessions of lovemaking we would lie in one another’s grasp, our libidos temporarily discharged and, for me at least, all of my demons slain. In those brief passages of total peace, our unclothed bodies against each other, we became totally vulnerable to one another, confessing the darkest and deepest secrets of our existences, our dreams, desires, fears, and insecurities. I knew then, as I know now, I can never be as close to another living person as I was to Emli. I just cannot conceive of having with anyone else what I had with her. It was a once-in-a-lifetime thing.
Eight months after our relationship began in earnest, Emli’s paternal grandmother, who lived in a very nice apartment at the southern periphery of the Los Feliz district, broke her hip in a fall. Emli at once moved in with her to care for her during her recovery. That development had all the potential for destroying, or at least obstructing, our relationship. It did not. We merely transitioned the site of our torrid encounters to my apartment. And the change in Emli’s circumstance provided me with the opportunity to move my intercourse with her into a whole other dimension. Prior to her accident, I had met Emli’s grandmother just once, having taken her out to dinner with her granddaughter one evening. During her convalescence I was, if not a frequent visitor to her apartment, a steady one. The second week after she was back from the hospital, I busied myself for an entire weekend building ramps at three spots around the apartment together with installing wall rails at a half dozen crucial spots to make the whole of the residence wheelchair accessible. I ducked into the place a good dozen times just to check on her, usually bringing her a sack full of almond, pistachio or macadamia nuts, which as far as I could tell, were her only weakness. On two occasions that I can clearly recollect, I was drawn into such long conversations with her that when we were away afterwards Emli protested that I seemed to be more interested in her grandmother than in her. While that was certainly not true, I had become very fond of the older woman. She was interesting to talk to in her own right, not to mention the insight she provided me on her granddaughter. And I could not help noticing certain quaint similarities in both women’s mannerisms and I remarked more than once to myself that in my golden years I could do a whole lot worse than retire to a nice little cottage in the country with someone just like Emli’s grandmother.
If anything, my relationship with Emli was intensifying. I was astonished at her intellectual depth and breadth. I read the books she had read and watched the movies she had seen. One of her interests was drawing and painting. I stood as a model for hours on end, clothed and unclothed, in her bedroom when she had her own apartment, in my living room, in my bedroom and in more than a few clearings deep in the woods while she rendered my likeness onto canvas or drawing paper. Practically overnight I became a dilettante art collector, frequenting art shows to pick up renderings, paintings, drawings and lithographs I would show off to her. I was always careful to get the name, studio location and phone number of the artists whose works I picked up. On occasion I drove her out to a few of those studios and I would break the ice by telling the artist that I had purchased a piece of his or her work at one art showing or another and then I would simply stand by while Emli would talk shop and technique with the artist.
Unbeknownst to Emli, on more than one of my visits to her grandmother during the period of her recovery I had succeeded in having the older woman show me the photo albums she kept. I scoured the photographs for the visual minutiae of her son’s family’s life and committed those tidbits to memory. Then later, when I was alone with Emli, I would make reference to what I had seen, asking about the balcony on the second story of the home she lived in when she was in grade school, or what the name of the skipperkee she had as childhood pet was, or the like. These things would always surprise her and she would say, “I don’t remember telling you about that! How did you know?”
To me it had become an indisputable fact of existence that Emli was my life’s mate. This was an outgrowth of my feeling, of course, but I saw and heard my passion reciprocated in her words and deeds. Her touch was amazing, but only the more so because of the words that accompanied it. She let me know that she craved and cherished me as much as I did her, and she inflated me to nearly heroic proportions in her verbal representation of me to others. At one point just before her grandmother’s mishap I was involved in a several-days-long trial in San Diego County Superior Court, necessitating that I stay at a downtown hotel there. Wednesday night, as I was returning after dinner, intent on going straight up to my room to call her, Emli greeted me in the lobby. “I hope you’re not mad,” she said. “I couldn’t stand being away from you another day. I had some comp time coming from overtime I’ve worked, so I took off Thursday and Friday.” She accompanied me to court both of the following days, sitting in the gallery, interested or at least feigning interest in my legal sparring with opposing counsel. We made a mini-vacation of that weekend, sojourning to Baja.
It was shortly after her grandmother’s recovery that our relationship took its final turn. By that point I had become obsessed with the prospect of merging my genes with hers. I began to talk of fulfilling that obsession, which I termed “my ultimate fantasy.” At first she seemed as pleased with the idea as was I. In retrospect, however, I believe that it was these too insistent overtures on my part which ultimately undid us. I was pressing, I see now, for a commitment Emli was not then prepared to make. I never formally proposed to her, but there was no mistaking my intent and the direction I was determined to go in. I openly mused about our children, how many we would have, what they would look like, their gender, what they would be when they grew up. I was so caught up in my own enthusiasm that I did not see, at least at the time, that the idea was somehow disturbing and frightening to her. And then one day, Emli unilaterally shattered my universe forever when out of the clear blue sky, over crumpets and morning tea at a coffee house around the block from my apartment, she informed me that we were through.
At that point of my recollection, I was brought into real time, as I turned off Sunset Boulevard and headed north on Vermont, still about five car lengths behind Emli. At the southernmost outskirts of the Los Feliz district she made a right turn off Vermont and we were on the street where Emli’s apartment was located, the same one she had moved into with her grandmother almost five years before. She pulled into the entranceway with the automatic gate that would take her down to where the parking structures were. I pulled over to the curb in front of the apartment complex and shut off the engine.
I opened the door and stepped out of the car. I went around the car, stepped up over the curb onto the sidewalk and trudged across the grass. The gate into the complex was locked. I made short work of jumping the fence and headed right along the walkway to the wide asphalt driveway where Emli had driven down. I met her coming out of the parking structure.
“Not much of a moon tonight,” I remarked. “That’s probably good.”
I turned and we walked out toward the entrance, Emli’s hard sole shoes taping out a light rhythm on the pavement. The gate was not locked from the inside. We went through it, across the grass and out to my car.