THE RIGHT TIME TO DIE

by Jason Whitlock

  “It’s a lie is what it is,” blurted Kendra. “Jordy and Missy got along just fine. Most times when she was over, she came to see him, not me.”

  “Was that the case yesterday, Kendra?” Dojcsak’s hand remained raised in a silent warning for Angela to not interfere. “Did Missy come to visit with your brother?”

  “They’s jealous, Mr. Dojcsak, including your girl. That’s all; jealous.” As if realizing now she’d said too much, Kendra continued, “Yesterday, Missy was over to see me. Me. She left at three. I don’t know to go where. She didn’t say. I didn’t ask. I never did. If I know’d, I would tell you. Why wouldn’t I?”

  “Enough, Ed.” No longer intimidated by Dojcsak’s raised palm, Angela stepped forward. Protectively, she placed an arm over her daughter’s shoulder. “We were over this last night, with Chris Burke.”

  “I understand, Angela, last night, after your niece was reported missing, but before she was found dead. It’s a different set of circumstances now, isn’t it?” Distressed, Kendra buried her face into her mother’s breast. “Where is Jordy, I’d like to speak with him if he’s here?”

  “I don’t know where the boy is, Ed, and I don’t care. Why not ask your girl? She’s as likely to know as anyone. Like an Oreo cookie, those two.”

  Dojcsak left shortly after, unable to illicit a satisfactory response to any of his follow up questions, satisfactory in this instance open to his interpretation. Standing by the river, he watched a family of mallards swim in, then out, then back into a V-like formation; father presumably in the lead, mother presumably bringing up the rear, sunlight on their feathered crowns reflecting back a brilliant emerald green.

  “She was found there,” he recalled someone once say while pointing to a place just beyond the churning turmoil of the water flowing over the dam. Shelly Hayden: seashell pink toenails, a smudge of freckles passing from one cheek to the other across the bridge of her nose, thirteen-years-old going on fourteen, or perhaps fourteen years already but appearing older, somehow more mature. In grade school, she was, he and a group of buddies believing maybe she’d been held back. A recent transplant from Albany, New York, whose father was in insurance and whose mother, who knew? Death by misadventure, Dojcsak recalled, a reasonable conclusion at the time; thirty years removed, it was inconvenient for Ed Dojcsak to imagine otherwise. With a heavy sigh, he walked what seemed to him the long, long distance to where earlier he’d parked his car.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  SARA WALKED. After parting company with Dojcsak and Burke, she proceeded along the river to a secluded area of riverfront frequented by what Dojcsak described as the “rougher elements”, that local contingent of teens given to the rambunctious and recently destructive behavior which was, Sara decided, uncharacteristic if not inevitable in a small town without sufficient distraction (not even a multiplex, though one was under construction and scheduled to open soon with a premier showing, Sara had been told, of yet another in the The Hunger Games franchise). That these elements included the Sheriff’s daughter was something Dojcsak seemed instinctively to accept, unlike the pending death of Luba, over which he agonized.

  It was late afternoon. Sara saw that Jenny was alone, waiting, possibly, on the arrival of friends. She sat smoking, staring out over the river, looking forlorn, though completely at ease in her solitude. Her heavy leather jacket was scuffed, pierced through in places with safety pins in a variety of colors, size and shape, as if meant to convey some deep yet ambiguous form of meaning beyond the capacity of the general population to understand.

  Jenny’s black jeans were ill fitted: dirty and too long. They pulled across the pavement as she walked (more of a shuffle her father complained), leaving them frayed at the cuff. Jenny had Dojcsak’s shape; tall and square, though her face was attractive, like her mother’s. Her hair was cropped short; sidewalls on the side and rear, topped with two-inch oily-black spikes. Jenny might have been pretty but had defiled herself with stainless steel: piercing over the eyebrow, through the nose, through the lower lip and in the tongue. She had pierced her ears from the lobe and around the outer edge with thirteen studs in each. (Behind her back, and sometimes to her face, Jenny was referred to as, the Battle Tank, to which she showed no apparent offense.)

  Sara approached. “Hey,” she said. Jenny acknowledged her presence with a glance but no reply.

  Jenny flipped her cigarette butt into the water. With difficulty, she stood to her feet and brushed the dirt from her jeans. Sara was tempted to ask: Still cutting? Knowing it would prove to be a false start, she asked instead, “Can we talk?”

  “Depends,” she replied, facing Sara.

  “On?”

  “Whether you’re here as a friend, or a cop.”

  “Under the circumstances, Jenny, it should be obvious. I’m here as both.”

  “In that case, I have nothing to say.” Jenny turned her back to Sara. “Did Ed put you up to this?”

  “We drew straws,” Sara said.

  “Fucking prick; doesn’t have the balls to talk to me himself.”

  “Hey, watch your mouth; it’s your father you’re talking about.”

  “Puh-lease. Since when has Ed ever been a father to me?”

  Beyond them the river rumbled over the dam. A stand of silver birch nodded in the breeze, tilting precariously out over the water, its grip on the rocky soil compromised by the corrosive effect of a constant current along the shoreline. Here, wild daisies bloomed and clustered in a tangle of spontaneity and abandon, the white petals and yellow centers resembling a dress Sara once owned that had been presented by her mother as an Easter gift. Sara loved the dress and wore it throughout the year without regard to either season or convention. (Her father did not like the dress; claimed he could see her panties and bra through the gauzy material. Her mother replied, “You shouldn’t be looking.”) After a while, the dress became threadbare from over use. A decision had to be made either to discard it or to donate it. Sara chose to donate, unable to accept a decision to throw it away, as if to her it was equivalent to the putting down of a family pet.

  At the edge of the unruly turf, sprigs of precocious Sweet William competed with the daisies for attention. Under other circumstances, Sara might gather a bouquet, carry the flowers home and place them in a vase, adding color and warmth to her small kitchen. But today, barely concealed within the underbrush, detritus marred an otherwise colorful surface. Compacted fast food containers, cigarette butts, condoms, shattered glass, scorched tree branches and larger pieces of driftwood and, Sara suspected though would not stoop to confirm it, the discarded remains of used needles.

  “Hard as it may be for you to comprehend, Jen, this isn’t about you.” An uncharacteristic edge to Sara’s tone caused Jenny to turn. “It’s about Missy. She’s the one who’s been brutally murdered and God knows what else. Left in a garbage bin as if she were the weekly trash. It’s about what I need to do about it and what you and your friends are going to do to help me. Do you have a problem with that?”

  “I’m not saying I have a problem, but what has it got to do with me or my friends?” Jenny’s tone and her look were noncommittal.

  “Don’t be obtuse. It has to do with everyone.”

  “I didn’t know her, only to see.”

  “More than that, Jen,” said Sara knowingly.

  Jenny pushed her hands deep in her pockets as if sulking. Her gaze fell to her boots. They were black leather with a three-inch thick rubber wedge sole fastened by a trio of heavy chrome buckles. Shit kicker in the truest sense and a pair Jenny coveted the day she saw them, no matter that on the day in question she was ex-funds and with no immediate prospect of obtaining any. Without needing to ask, her companion at the Wal-Mart that day—Jordy Bitson—had sensed her desire and her dilemma.

  “It’s cool,” he said. “We’ll get you the boots.”

  Jordy instructed her to hail a sales clerk and have her retrieve from storage a pair Jenny’s size. Jenny did. By the time the clerk�
�all of eighteen years and frantically working a wad of chewing gum—returned, Jordy was nowhere to be seen. Jenny slipped on the boots with the intention of testing them for comfort and for fit. No sooner had she fastened the oversize chrome buckles did the fire alarm sound, a high-pitched metronomous wail that sent both employees and shoppers—including Jenny—scrambling in a mad dash past the cash registers to the nearest exit. Afterward, Jenny asked how Jordy could know she wouldn’t be detained.

  “For a thirty-dollar pair of shoes and a seven-buck minimum wage? It don’t make for heroes, Jen. She’ll tell her homey-ass friends how she kept her melon while those around her were losing their’s, not how you walked off on her with a butt-ugly pair of new boots, while she pooped her lily-white-ass panties.”

  “You think they’re ugly?” Jenny asked him then.

  “Doh, they belong in a museum,” he replied, the first syllable uttered à la Homer Simpson. “Right next to the shoes of Dr. Frankenstein’s Monster.”

  Jenny admitted to Sara she did know the dead girl better than only to see. But should she admit to having despised Missy Bitson, to being envious at her having matured into the appealing young specimen Jenny had not and never would become, and to believing Missy a tart who’d got all she deserved in that alley and being discovered as if she were no better than trash was, all things considered, somehow apropos? Should she confess her resentment over the increasing attention paid to Missy by the dead girl’s cousin and Jenny’s neighbor, Jordy Bitson, or tell Sara that while the lactose intolerant Jordy had no qualms about passing the most vile sort of wind in her presence, he would not so much as utter the word fart in the presence of his cousin?

  Or admit to Sara that it hadn’t always been this way; a couple of years maybe, since Missy had grown six inches and developed a serious looking set of tits? Sara would know, of course, that Jenny was acquainted with Jordy. They had, after all, grown up across the street from each other, hadn’t they? Through Jordy, Sara would know of Jenny’s acquaintance with Missy. She was, after all, a frequent visitor to her cousin’s home wasn’t she? But Jenny did not imagine Sara could guess even remotely at the depth of the relationship between the three, not unless it was revealed to her by Jordy himself and to the cops, Jenny was convinced, Jordy wasn’t talking.

  “I’ll tell you what I know, Sara,” Jenny said now, “which isn’t much.” She extracted a cigarette, her third since arriving here, ignited and began to talk, in absolute contradiction of her claim that it wouldn’t be much.

  …

  “Missy is a spoiled little brat; always was,” said Jenny. “Everyone treated her as if she was something special. She was, but not in the way most people think.”

  Sara said, “You sound resentful, Jen; or even worse.” From her tone, Sara wasn’t convinced Jen could be impartial.

  Exhaling a perfectly formed smoke ring at Sara, Jen asked, “How well did you know her?”

  “I didn’t; only to see around town.”

  “Then how ‘bout you let me tell the story.”

  Sara gestured with her hands, as if giving Jenny the floor.

  “She started coming around, hanging out with Kendra when I was twelve, maybe thirteen. Missy must have been about eight or nine-years-old then; I think she was maybe four years younger than me. I’d been hanging out with Jordy then, you know, the two of us the neighborhood misfits. Mostly, we sat around, listening to the same shit on our Ipods; I mean, what else did we have in common? Saturday afternoons, his parents spent the day drinking uptown in the pub.” Jennifer chuckled. “We used to get into all sorts of shit; his parents’ booze, cigarettes. I remember, one time, Jordy showed me his old man’s stash of porno magazines. I thought: how gross is that? But Jordy was into it, so I thought: hey, whatever turns your crank, right?”

  “Did Jordy ever act out his fantasies with you?”

  As if resentful he hadn’t, Jenny said, “No.”

  “Was it just the two of you?”

  Jenny said, “No, we used to make Kendra and Missy watch.”

  Sara’s stomach jumped to her throat. Before she could frame a reply, Jenny said, “I’m kidding, Sara. What do you think I am, a perv?” Jenny turned to the river. “It was just something to do, to kill an afternoon. No big deal.”

  “Okay, so you were just curious; about the booze, the cigarettes and the porn. But what about Kendra? If Jordy’s parents were getting blitzed uptown, who was looking out for her?”

  “Well, technically, we were supposed to, but Jordy’d give his sister a bag of potato chips, a soda and a couple of Snickers, and Kendra and Missy would disappear for the afternoon.”

  “You never worried what they might be up to?”

  “Like I should care? She wasn’t my sister. As far as I was concerned, it was Jordy’s problem. Besides, I was thirteen. Neither Ed or Rena gave a shit what I was up to; too obsessed with Luba.” Jenny kicked at the dirt with her boot. “Go figure. It isn’t as if they can influence her future, is it?”

  At this moment, not wanting to become bogged down in Jenny’s problems, Sara asked, “What about Missy’s mother?”

  Again, Jennifer laughed. “If Maggie had ever found out, she would‘ve shit.”

  Sara moved to stand nearer to Jennifer. She said, “Okay, from an early age, Missy spends unsupervised weekends with her cousin, Kendra.”

  “At first, I thought she was a cute kid, you know; harmless. One afternoon, Jordy and I are sittin’, chillin’, listening to some sick shit on the radio. Missy is there, as usual, Jordy and me sucking on a pint of JD.”

  “Jack Daniels?”

  “No, juice d’orange.”

  “Were you drunk?”

  “Buzzed, but not too far gone to know better.”

  “Know better than what?”

  “Missy was a little con, Sara. She comes downstairs as if she’s the fucking Queen of Sheba. Her and Kendra have been into Angela’s make-up. Missy has it smeared across her eyelids, her cheeks, her lips; she looks like a clown. She’s wearing these high-heel shoes that are about five sizes too big; she can barely stand. I laugh. I mean, really, it’s fucking hilarious. But Jordy doesn’t think it’s funny at all. Starts playing up to her, you know, as if maybe he’s getting off on it, digging his little cousin. Missy is young, but not too innocent to see what she’s doing to Jordy. She starts to strut, you know, to swivel her hips.” Jennifer walks along the riverbank, swaying her own hips in an exaggerated too-and-fro’ motion. “I tell Jordy to knock it off, to quit encouraging her.”

  “And?”

  “Missy asks us for a taste. I say, no way, you little shit; your parents will kill us.”

  “And Jordy?”

  “He’s mesmerized, as if she isn’t Missy at all. I mean, she doesn’t even have tits, Sara; she’s as flat as a board.”

  “So? What do you do?”

  “I’m outta’ there. After Jordy pours a shot of Jack Daniels into her Coke can, I figure: I don’t need this noise.”

  “You leave him alone with the girls?” Sara said, as if somehow Jenny’s behavior is unconscionable.

  “What? I’m expected to baby-sit all three of them?”

  “You don’t know what happened after you left?”

  “Didn’t know, didn’t ask, didn’t care. Not my problem; stopped hanging around his place after that. Not that he asked.”

  “You stopped being friends?”

  Jenny said, “Still hung around together, but after that, he treated me as if I was just one of the guys.”

  “And Missy?”

  “Jordy never treated Missy as if she were one of the guys. Lately, the two are as tight as a foreskin.”

  Sara said, “You know, Jen, you really have a way with words.”

  “Yeah, so they tell me. I should be a writer.” She ignited another cigarette. “So, you want to hear more, or do you have someplace to be?”

  …

  After speaking with Jenny, Sara returned to the office, determined to commit her observatio
ns to paper before the salient details escaped completely from her mind. It was after six and she was glad to be alone. Burke, undoubtedly, was uptown carousing or otherwise at the Fox n’ Fiddle. Dojcsak, presumably, was at the Oasis drinking beer with the Identification Officer who had earlier arrived from Albany to hand deliver the autopsy report.

  Sara wondered at their diligence in preparing meaningful reports, believing it unlikely. She couldn’t know that while Christopher Burke was indeed carousing or otherwise at the Fox n’ Fiddle, prior to having arrived there, he had scribbled in his own peculiarly fussy script a report in which he detailed the facts of the unfolding inquiry as he understood them to be.

  For his part, Ed Dojcsak was thoughtful, discussing the case with Paul Kruter. Though Kruter offered no special insight as to a motive for the crime or the criminal that might do such a thing, he did say that, as a betting man, his money was on someone the girl knew, not on one of the many temporary workers that flowed through Dojcsak’s community like sludge. A safe bet, Dojcsak thought, but didn’t say.