The Daughter She Used To Be

by Rosalind Noonan

  “Bernie Sullivan, what did you do to my client?”

  “Excuse me? Who is this?”

  “Laurence Saunders. Tell me why my client keeps calling you an angel. Or is Angel a nickname of yours?”

  The hospital ... Curtis must have been more lucid than she had realized. “You could say it’s a nickname.”

  “You are not making my job easy. Peyton Curtis was finally discharged from the hospital, and the first two minutes I get with him at Rikers, he’s asking about you, saying he wants you to handle his case.”

  “Really?” Bernie was up on her feet, pacing.

  “It’s totally fucked. Since when does a DA defend a triple murder suspect?”

  “Oh.” Reality hit. “You’re right. But I do want to help on the case.”

  “I don’t need this. My first big-profile case, and the client’s asking for some Nancy Drew from the DA’s office.”

  “I told you, I want to help, Mr. Saunders. And if it makes Peyton Curtis feel better having me there, that would help, right?”

  “This is crazy,” Saunders said, though he no longer sounded totally convinced. “Listen, are you willing to resign your position with the DA’s office? Cut your affiliations there?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “And you can’t just sit in on meetings like we’re all getting pedicures together. I need to protect my client’s privacy.”

  “Right. So you could make me an official part of the defense team. Not that I expect to sit at the table or anything.”

  “I should hope not.” He let out a bellowing sigh. “What’s minimum wage in New York State these days?”

  Her pulse quickened. A door was opening here. “I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”

  “Do that. And listen up. I’m going to give you an address, and I want you to meet me there tomorrow.”

  “Rikers Island?” she asked.

  “No. I’m done with Curtis for now. Got some preliminary information from him. Tomorrow we’re going to try and get some more background information to fill out the story. Meet me at this address, tomorrow at two.”

  She copied down the address he gave her, which was an apartment in nearby Flushing. “Who will we be interviewing?”

  “Yvonne Curtis, Peyton’s mother. I asked her to come to us but she’s afraid to leave her apartment right now. She’s had some trouble with vandalism and break-ins. She sounds scared, and I don’t blame her. Maybe she’ll feel better having a woman there.”

  “Okay, Mr. Saunders. I’ll be there.”

  “That makes me sound so old. Just call me Laurence. And make sure the DA gets your resignation in writing. I don’t want any judge looking at me with crossed eyes.”

  Although the Blair Housing Project was a short walk from Main Street Flushing, Bernie felt as if she were stepping into a foreign land as she crossed the tarred lot that skirted the building complex, barren but for a few bony gray trees and a small playground that cried out for some wood chips and renovation. Aside from two Asian men walking on the distant street, everyone she passed was black, which made Bernie very conscious that she was the minority here, walking in her flannel coat with her leather briefcase-sized satchel slung over her shoulder. She bypassed the broken elevator and opened the door to the staircase, on alert from the voices of women and teenagers that peppered her climb.

  Yvonne Curtis’s door wasn’t difficult to find; it had been painted over with gray splotches of paint to cover the graffiti. Bernie knocked, and the door was cracked open.

  “Who is it?” called a female voice.

  “Bernadette Sullivan. I work with Laurence Saunders.” There was the scraping of bolts and chains, then the door opened to a short, round-faced woman with smooth brown skin and ample proportions. “Laurence Saunders is already here. Who are you?”

  “She’s helping me,” Saunders called from inside. “Come on in, Bernadette.”

  Yvonne Curtis opened the door and leaned on it, scrutinizing Bernie as she entered.

  “Thanks. You’re Yvonne Curtis?” Bernie said, trying to break the ice a little.

  “Mmm-hmm.” Mrs. Curtis kept her lips pursed, her hands on the door. Saunders had thought Mrs. Curtis would feel more comfortable with another woman present, but his plan wasn’t quite working. She thinks I’m some Yuppie white woman, Bernie thought. And she’s not far from the truth.

  The apartment was tidy and clean. A home, Bernie thought as she passed a wall with studio shots of a baby boy on her way to the living room, where Saunders sat on a blue microfiber love seat.

  “We already started,” Yvonne Curtis told Bernie.

  “I got here early.” Saunders looked up, his eyes unreadable through the glare of his thick glasses. “Have a seat. I’m recording our conversation, but you can take over with the notes.”

  He handed her a yellow legal pad and she hit the ground running.

  “So where were we?” Saunders asked, pointing to the notes he’d just handed over. “Peyton’s medical issues.”

  “Like I said, he was always small, but he was healthy and all. Then they beat him up when he was nine. Boys on the playground whopped him good, damaged his head. That’s why he limps that way. My Peyton’s got so many health problems now. Part of his face is paralyzed, and he gets seizures, too.”

  Bernie thought of Gracie, now nine, being attacked by other kids on the playground and beaten within an inch of her life ... then quickly tried to snap the heinous image from her mind. Certainly a trauma like that would affect the course of a person’s life.

  “What you looking at me with those squinty eyes, judging me.” Yvonne’s fists were on her hips as she glared at Bernie. “You think I didn’t do enough as his mother? You think I didn’t protect my baby?”

  “I was just thinking how hard it is for any parent to protect a child.” Bernie held the woman’s gaze, determined not to back down. “Especially a son.” Married men joked about losing sleep over protecting their daughters, but weren’t their sons the real worries? Men had to deal with the aggression of other males, as well as the challenge to prove their manhood over and over again. And then society insisted on defining men by their career choices, while women seemed able to play many roles.

  Yvonne had turned away, but Bernie was thinking of Brendan, who hadn’t chosen to be a cop originally. He’d done landscaping, but it wasn’t considered to be a real profession. No insurance coverage, and you couldn’t pay the bills in the winter months ...

  Laurence Saunders’s voice brought her back to the conversation.

  “How about family history. You say Peyton didn’t have any brothers?”

  “No, sir. Just his two sisters, Janine and Gwen.” Yvonne perched on the far end of the sofa where Bernie was sitting. “Half sisters, if you want the real truth. Their father came along after Peyton’s daddy took off when he was a baby, Never heard from him again, but I had Peyton. He was my first, my baby.”

  “Are those Peyton’s baby pictures on the wall?” Bernie asked.

  “No, that’s Baby Wills, Gwen’s son. He stays here with his mother sometimes.”

  “He’s a cute kid,” Bernie said, trying to find common ground.

  Yvonne Curtis sucked a tooth and looked over at Saunders. “My Gwen has two children. Her daughter, Kiandra, is twelve, and Wills is still a baby.”

  “I thought Peyton mentioned a brother.” Saunders screwed up his mouth, pressing two fingers to one temple. “Darnell ... does that ring a bell?”

  “He’s my stepson, but I took him in and tried to raise him like my own but it never did work out. His father, he couldn’t stay off the booze, and Darnell got into drugs, too. He’s trouble, that one. Darnell Tarpley’s his name. I wish I threw him out a long time ago. It’s hard to come back from the damage a man like that can do.”

  “Does Darnell live here now?”

  “No, sir, he’s in Attica, serving twenty years for murder. He’s got eighteen to go, and I hope they keep him longer.”

  “How did P
eyton get along with Darnell?” Bernie asked.

  Yvonne seemed annoyed by the question, but she answered. “He was under Darnell’s thumb. He couldn’t help it. Darnell is just that way. A real street thug.”

  Bernie wrote quickly, hoping that she would understand her own scribbles later. Some of the information had been in the news reports, but the mention of the stepbrother was new.

  “It sounds like Darnell was a bad influence. Do you think he influenced Peyton’s behavior?”

  “Darnell’s the reason my Peyton got sent upstate to prison in the first place. Darnell set Peyton up to do this armed robbery, said if Peyton pulled it off he’d have enough money so he’d never have to work another day in his life. Instead, Peyton got five years up at Lakeview Shock.”

  “That’s right. I have that in my notes,” Laurence said. “Peyton wasn’t out of prison long before the incident happened. Do you think he had trouble adjusting to life outside?”

  “He never had a chance.” Yvonne’s voice hitched, her tight demeanor melting with emotion. “The cops picked him up soon as he stepped off the bus.” She paused, staring down at the floor to compose herself. “He didn’t even make it home that first night. The second night, we got rousted by a bunch of commando cops. Warrant squad, looking for somebody. Wrong address.” She shook her head.

  “Yeah, those warrant squads don’t care who they wake up,” Laurence said sympathetically.

  “Next day, he was gone when I left for work. I come home and find him hurt, his shoulder bleeding.” She sniffed and two tears trailed down her face.

  “I know this is hard.” Laurence took his large glasses off and wiped them with a cloth from his pocket. Bernie suspected that he was just giving Peyton’s mother a chance to calm herself.

  “I didn’t know that he was the Coffee Shop Killer. I didn’t know,” she wailed. “My baby’s not a monster. He’s not the devil’s spawn, like they’re saying.”

  Laurence shot Bernie an awkward look while Yvonne sobbed into a tissue. She sensed that his sympathy was genuine, but most attorneys did not have the time or patience to counsel family members of the accused.

  “He was such a good boy,” Yvonne said, sniffing. “He was my baby once. My little Peyton.”

  The photos of the laughing baby boy on the wall caught Bernie’s eye again, and in her mind she saw Yvonne jostling him on her lap.

  She saw Yvonne cradling Baby Peyton, a single mother, scared and hopeful. When you waded past the details, Yvonne Curtis was simply a mother who loved her son.

  Leaving the legal pad on the sofa, Bernie went to Yvonne Curtis and pressed her palm between the older woman’s shoulder blades. Mrs. Curtis’s sobs went on, but she didn’t flinch or object as Bernie gently rubbed her back.

  If only a mother’s love could straighten the path of her child. If only.

  The next day, as Bernie sat beside Laurence Saunders in a hired Lincoln Town Car headed north toward Sing Sing Correctional Facility, Saunders spared her a compliment.

  “You did okay with Mrs. Curtis yesterday. I like that you know how to go with your gut. But don’t expect too much from Peyton Curtis.” Saunders took a stapled report from his briefcase and handed it across the backseat of the car, which was fairly hovering in a sea of automobiles on the West Side Highway.

  “What’s this?” Bernie asked, trying to swallow back her nervousness. It was her first visit to a prison, her first meeting with Curtis in an official capacity, and the road that loomed ahead was riddled with hazards. What if Curtis recognized her from that day in the hospital? What if the awake and aware Curtis was a seething, spitting monster?

  “You are looking at Peyton Curtis’s psychiatric evaluation.” Laurence pulled out his laptop, presumably to work while they were stuck in traffic. “Check it out. He’s not crazy, as you probably suspected. But he does suffer from amnesia.”

  “Really.” She tried to keep the disbelief from her voice. She had always thought amnesia was rare and overly dramatized in movies.

  “Certainly, he’s had post-traumatic amnesia. That time when he got hurt in the schoolyard, back when he was nine? His memory of that event is hazy. And he’s drawing a big blank on the day of the coffeehouse shootings, which the doc says may be dissociative amnesia. That’s the inability to remember details of a stressful or traumatic event.”

  So he didn’t remember ... at least she wouldn’t have to worry about the hospital incident. She skimmed the doctor’s report, noting that post-traumatic amnesia was usually due to a blow to the head. It made sense in that context. As a prosecutor, she had seen people injured in car accidents who often had no recall of the incident.

  As the Town Car picked up speed, she allowed herself a deep, calming breath.

  “Another thing.” Saunders spoke as his fingers pecked at the keyboard. “Don’t expect to get any answers on why he did it.”

  “I didn’t—”

  “You can deny it all you want, but I’ve been down this road. Victims and their families want to know why. It’s understandable, but half the time the reasons are insane. The other times, it’s about money or drugs or sex. I’m just saying, it never makes sense. Not really.”

  Although she nodded in agreement, she held on to the hope that things would be different in the case of Peyton Curtis. She would find some answers—maybe not the definitive reason—but she would assemble a puzzle spotted with missing pieces, something to point to and shake her head over and cast aside after the truth had been digested.

  The prison was isolated by a strip of deserted land, an oasis along the Hudson. Bernie shadowed Saunders’s moves and tried to follow the barked instructions of prison guards who didn’t understand that this was her first time.

  Countless steel bars rolled open and shut behind them before they arrived at the small meeting room where Peyton Curtis was waiting. He was a small man, hardly intimidating in his orange jumpsuit. He sat in a short wooden chair, one arm cradled in a navy cloth sling, the other dangling in his lap. His head hung to one side in a dejected manner, but when the door rattled open and he lifted his chin, Bernie realized that it was the partial paralysis that gave him that frowning expression.

  Laurence entered the room first, his bigger-than-life presence making the space shrink even smaller.

  Curtis nodded, slack-jawed. Then he looked around Laurence, to where Bernie stood with the guard. His jaw dropped, eyes popping. “It’s you!”

  Bernie felt her face grow warm. “That’s right. My name’s Bernadette Sullivan, and—”

  “You’re the angel from my dreams.”

  And you’re supposed to have amnesia, Bernie thought as her mouth went dry. She decided no answer was appropriate here. As she and Laurence sat on tiny furniture that looked as if it had been scavenged from a kindergarten classroom, Saunders made quick introductions.

  The little chairs made her glad she had worn a long, loose dress. Laurence took the chair directly across from Peyton Curtis. He leaned toward him and gestured with two fingers toward his own eyes.

  “Eyes on me,” Laurence said. “It’s not polite to stare. Bernadette is here to help us round out your portrait for the judge, jury, and the general public, too,” Laurence explained. “We need to teach people what it was like to walk a day in Peyton Curtis’s shoes before any of this happened. Lot of folks out there think you’re a monster, Peyton. Have you read the newspapers they got in here?”

  Peyton shook his head.

  “Do you know how to read?”

  “Of course I can read.” Peyton looked at Bernie, then seemed to remember and turned away. “I went to school, didn’t I? Got a scholarship from a Catholic school in Flushing.”

  “So why haven’t you read the newspapers to see what they’re saying about you? What your mama’s going through?” Laurence asked. “Aren’t you curious?”

  Peyton’s eyes dropped to the floor. “What’s the sense in reading about the world out there? In here you learn that things on the outside don’t matter.
It’s a different world in here.”

  “Anyone messing with you?”

  “Nah. I keep to myself and people leave me alone. Someone comes to help with my arm, for physical therapy. He’s helping me with the other arm, too, says I can get some of my strength back.”

  “Good. Good. You get strong, and we’ll work on keeping you alive man,” said Saunders.

  “That’s what angels do.” Peyton’s lopsided grin sent a chill quivering up Bernie’s back, though she wasn’t sure why.

  The trip to Sing Sing became a daily routine for Bernie and Laurence Saunders, who seemed to think that Peyton’s references to “his angel” were intended to be pickup lines. Why does he call me that? Bernie wondered. Had he seen her as an angel in a drug-induced hallucination back in the hospital room? It made her wonder if Peyton Curtis believed in God. He had mentioned attending Catholic school; that tidbit of information would curl Sully’s toes.

  If she ignored the occasional unsettling angel references, the interview process was interesting, sometimes sad when Curtis relayed the difficulties he had faced as a child and as an adult. Curtis’s recollection ended when he was on a bus headed south from Lakeview Shock, the prison where he’d spent five years; at least his amnesia would save Bernie from the details of the chilling shooting.

  But the pattern of abuse that Saunders was fishing for always broke down when it came to questions about Darnell Tarpley, the stepbrother who had been involved in the cruel playground assault that had left Peyton permanently injured.

  “Why the hell won’t you talk about Darnell?” Laurence asked in a fit of temper one time when Peyton shut down.

  “I got nothing to say about him, that’s all.”

  “Listen, Peyton.” Laurence rubbed his face, his big glasses rising to reflect the cold fluorescent lights. “I’m here to help you, but I am not a mind reader. I’m only as good as the information you give me.”

  “What’s the sense in talking about something I don’t even remember?” With some effort, Peyton dragged his stiff right hand across his body and rubbed his other arm. “What’s the sense in that?”