Either way, my troubles would be over.
I didn’t know where Darren was supposed to be sleeping, and besides, he undoubtedly had his wallet safely tucked into the back pocket of his jeans where it always was. But he might have extra cash in his suitcase. Or a credit card – I could always forge his signature, and he always just used D.A. Cleary on his cards, instead of Darren Andrew. (He liked the connotation, he said.) I had just been accused of being a thief, which I truly had never been. But I was resourceful, and I figured I might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb.
My room was directly at the top of the wide staircase. Purse in hand, I kicked off Ginger’s sandals and carried them, hoping nobody would hear and remember I was up here. I crept down the hallway, glancing into open doorways. This was only the second floor, and I remembered Ginger saying that the boys’ room was on the third. But was that the old house, the one in Huntington Beach? Fuck.
The first room I tried was definitely just a spare room. Not a personal touch anywhere.
Next to this was a bathroom. I heard Darren at the foot of the stairs calling my name, so I called out I’d be down in a minute. I ducked into the bathroom and locked the door. I wasn’t ready to go back down there and try to talk to strange police people.
It smelled like Ginger. I opened the medicine cabinet, and there was a half-empty bottle of her old standby perfume, Chanel No. 5. A hairbrush with a few of her hairs still caught in the bristles. Nivea, of course. I touched everything, softly, not moving anything. Breathing deeply, I closed my eyes.
Idly, I opened the cabinet under the sink.
A large box of Tampax at the front made me smile. Made me a teenager again, back in the bathroom at home in Maine with Ginger. I squatted down and removed it. There was a travel case with a few small bottles of shampoo and an old dried-up bar of Pears soap. Ginger was very brand-oriented; fickle she was not, even with her soap. The basic detritus of a woman’s life. A messy woman’s life. I smiled and settled more comfortably on the floor, rifling through my sister’s things.
At the back was a plastic grocery bag. I pulled it out.
Inside was a wig. A short black spiky wig. Good quality too; seemed to me like it was made from human hair.
Funny, I thought. One of the reasons I had wanted to dye my hair black in the first place was so that I wouldn’t look so much like Ginger. Even though she lived a couple of thousand miles away from me, I didn’t want her in any way associated with me, for her sake. And it seemed like she was trying to look like me.
Makeup. Loads and loads of it. Bright red lipsticks, kohl eyeliners, fake lashes, some still in containers, some pulled off and just thrown in loose, like dead spiders. A pair of torn stockings. A cheap, trashy bra. Very unlike my sporty sister.
But which smelled, even a foot away and with my limited olfactory sense, like Chanel No. 5.
At the bottom of the bag was a cheap plastic wallet.
I realized I was sweating as I pulled it out, and I pushed my bangs off my face.
Inside the wallet, there were twenties. And fifties, and tens. A few dozen bills at least, thrown in haphazardly, crumpled. I held my breath. There was more. Two credit cards, an American Express Platinum card and a MasterCard. They both looked new. Both bore the name Danielle Cleary.
I turned them over. Both with a close approximation of my signature.
I realized I was barely breathing, and I also realized that I was about to pass out. Since I was a kid, this has happened to me at moments of great stress – I will stop breathing without realizing it, until I actually faint. It’s embarrassing to admit, but there you are. My name is Danny Cleary, and I am a swooner.
I threw everything on the floor and fished around in the wallet. There was one more piece of identification.
A California driver’s license, bearing the name Danielle Cleary. With a picture of Ginger, wearing the black wig that was sitting on the floor in front of me, skin paler than I can ever remember her having, and red lipstick. And gaunt. Like me.
Like I had become.
For a few seconds, I started to hope. Ginger could be alive. She went and got her sons yesterday. Something had gone seriously wrong, gotten very seriously fubar, but she was out there somewhere. She was not lying on a cold slab in the morgue.
She was out there, alive, and in trouble. She needed me, was calling out to me.
It was the last thought I had, before something cracked behind me, and the whole world went black.
* * *
“Danny. Danny.”
I thought it was Gene for a second. I thought D-Man was outside and I had passed out on the couch waiting for him. D-Man was outside, and I was having a cat nap before our next delivery. Gene needed twenty bucks for Bruno.
“It’s in my wallet,” I said, clearly enough. Or so I thought.
“What, Beanpole, what?” Darren was shaking me. “I’m calling 911.”
He started to move away from me, and things were clear again. I was on the bathroom floor. At Ginger’s house. All around me were the things I’d found in her vanity. Except the plastic wallet, which I could feel under my butt.
I tried to sit up. “Someone must have hit me.”
“No, Bean,” Darren said. I was starting to be able to focus on his face. “You had one of your fits.”
That’s what my family had called my fainting attacks: fits. Like I was an eighteenth-century epileptic. It was a family joke. Ha freaking ha.
“No,” I said. “I didn’t.” I always knew when I was about to faint. I had a few seconds of a weird sort of carbonation feeling in my brain, like club soda had been funnelled into my head. I tried to sit up. “Ow.” The back of my head throbbed. In one particular spot. This was not how I woke up from my, um, fits.
“I was looking for you. I checked your room, then I saw this light was on with the door closed, and the door was locked… Danny, you know you’re not supposed to lock bathroom doors. I had to break it down.” He sounded very, very tired. And scared. “We need to talk about next steps. We need to talk about the boys. You need to be part of this. You can’t wander around locking doors.”
“A girl needs her privacy,” I answered. This time I was able to sit up, with Darren pulling my arms. I adjusted my weight a bit so that my butt was still covering the wallet. I didn’t think about why, but I didn’t want him to know about it yet.
“What is all this crap?” Darren asked, looking at the stuff on the floor.
“I don’t know,” I said, chucking stuff back inside the sink as though none of it had any more import than the Pears soap. “I came in to pee and I thought I smelled her in here. Some of her stuff is here. I wanted to look at it.”
Darren sighed and sat back against the closed door. “Oh, Beanpole,” he said. After a pause, he said, “This is kinda weird, when you think about it.”
“Yeah, well, so color me weird,” I answered, moving my butt a little more.
“No. Ginger and Fred have a huge bathroom off their bedroom. It’s, like, palatial. Why would she have her stuff in here?”
Why indeed.
I felt the back of my head. “Another one for you, then,” I said.
“Go,” he said.
“Why, if I just had one of my fits, do I have a huge goose egg on the back of my skull?” I poked it again. “Jesus.”
Darren reached over and touched it. I flinched. “Yes,” he said slowly. “You do. Are you sure you didn’t have it already?”
I looked at him. “No, doofus, I did not have it before. Ow.” I prodded it a bit with my fingers. “The door was locked, Darren. The door was definitely locked. You know that yourself. And I think I’d remember if somebody had broken the door down and conked me over the head.” I was feeling giddy. Ginger might be alive.
Darren looked sadly at me. “Bean. Did you score?”
“When, exactly, would I have gotten crack and smoked it, fuckbrain?” I said. There’s nothing more frustrating for an addict than to be actually telling the tr
uth for a change, and not to be believed. “Darren.”
He looked at me for a minute. “Okay.”
I looked around the room. There was a window, but there was no way I wouldn’t have noticed someone come in that way. And short of crawling out of the toilet…
“Oh fuck,” I said. “The shower.”
The large Jacuzzi tub/shower combo had a dark maroon shower curtain pulled back. I thought maybe I had registered the curtain being closed when I walked in, but who could remember? I had a lump the size of Delaware on my head.
“I don’t feel so good,” I said.
“Me either,” Darren said. “What is going on here, Danny?”
“No,” I said. “I mean, I really don’t feel so good. I’m going to heave.” I had my hand on my stomach.
“I’m not leaving you alone again,” he said.
“There’s no one here now, unless they’re in a drainpipe. They must have gone out the window. Now stand outside the door and plug your ears.” Darren had a sensitive gag reflex. If he heard or saw puking, it would start him off. He had to be very careful going to movies.
One look at me obviously told him that I meant business, and he did what I said.
As soon as he was out of the room, I climbed to my feet slowly. My purse was on the floor behind the door, half spilled onto the ground. More evidence, as far as I was concerned, that someone had conked me on the head and taken a flyer out the window – it was on the second floor, but even I could manage a jump from this height. I made sure the window was locked, and as quickly as I could with a pain in my head that was starting to gain momentum by the minute, I chucked the plastic Ginger/Danielle wallet into my bag.
Then I proceeded to throw up for real. I didn’t have to fake it for Darren’s benefit. I thought I was losing the lining of my stomach. I rinsed out my mouth and splashed water on my face. Darren was knocking on the door.
“Danny? You okay?”
When I opened the door, Detectives Miller and French were standing next to Darren.
“EMTs are on their way, Miss Cleary,” Detective Miller said, all business now. “Tell us what happened.” Detective French motioned for me to come out of the bathroom. As soon as I did, another cop, or investigator or whatever, appeared from behind her, a tall Asian guy, and as I looked behind me, I saw that he was photographing the room. Just like on CSI.
“I don’t need an EMT, and I don’t have health insurance down here,” I said. For some reason, I was too embarrassed to tell him about my financial status. Not that he didn’t probably already know. Tell him I’m a crack addict? No problem. About to go bankrupt? Shameful.
“I’ll pay for it,” Darren said, at the same time as Miller was telling me that arrangements would be made.
“Like a funeral,” I said. “Arrangements.” I felt sick again. There was going to be a funeral, at some point. We were going to have to bury Ginger. What did she want done? Cremation? I couldn’t remember if we had ever talked about it.
Then everything became even more chaotic, as two EMTs arrived on the scene. They sat me on a chair in the hallway and forced me to do a few follow-the-finger kind of tests – preliminary neurological tests, they said – and poked at my head. It hurt.
“That hurts,” I said. We were in my bedroom now, and second techie was in the bathroom now, dusting for fingerprints or something.
“This is definitely a recent trauma,” the female paramedic told Miller. “The skin is newly broken back there. Not much, she’s not bleeding much, and head injuries bleed like a mother— I mean, head injuries tend to bleed profusely. But it’s definitely new, and we’re going to have to take her in and check for concussion or other injuries. But I think she’s fine.” The male EMT was bustling around, taking my blood pressure and in general getting in the way. “Ha,” I said. “Told you somebody hit me.”
“How did this happen,” Darren said to Miller. All of a sudden he looked threatening again. I was seeing a whole new side to my brother in the last twenty-four hours. “With a house full of cops.”
Miller sighed. “I honestly don’t know. Officers are securing the perimeter.” He looked down at me. “How do you feel?”
“Other than a headache, fine,” I answered truthfully. I did. It surprised me. I wanted crack. Later I would smoke some crack. If I could get away from everyone, I would go to the Sunny Jim, where Ginger died, and I would smoke. The thought made me stronger.
Miller was leaning over pretty close. I could smell Old Spice and cigarettes. I liked it.
“There are too many people in this house,” Darren said. “Who all was here? And I haven’t walked through this whole place yet. Is there another way out, other than the front stairs? I haven’t seen anything.”
Miller shook his head. “There’s a third floor, which of course is being checked now, but unless we hear something from one of my men in the next five seconds, I think we can assume that it’s empty.”
At that moment, a cop from far, far down the hallway, around the corner and out of sight, yelled, “Third floor, clear!” It was kind of exciting. Anything to take me out of my head. My head was not a good place to be.
Miller smiled. “See?” He leaned against the wall. “Within a couple of minutes the house and property will have been checked. It is possible that the man who did this to you—”
“Or woman,” I interrupted.
“Do you think it was a woman?” Miller asked quickly.
“No. I mean, I have no idea. But I wanted to be politically correct.”
He nodded. “The perpetrator could have come in a second-floor window from a ladder and left the same way. This house,” he said, looking around, “has a lot of rooms. But there are more than a dozen officers on the property at the moment, apart from myself and Detective French. We’ll find something.” He patted my knee gently, as the EMTs insisted on loading me onto a stretcher. I had my purse clutched tightly onto my lap. I made sure it was zipped up.
Darren was pacing. He followed my stretcher down the stairs, telling the EMTs to take it easy. Under the circumstances, it was comforting. It had been a long time since someone had looked out for me like that.
Outside, Darren tried to climb into the ambulance with me. “No,” I said. “Darren. Go to the morgue.”
“Hey, drama queen,” Darren said. “You’re not that bad. I think you’ll make it.”
“F-U-C-K-U,” I said. I closed my eyes. The headache seemed to be getting worse. “Go and see Ginger. Okay? And find the boys. Please. And take one of the detectives.”
“Why?”
“I have a bad feeling about this, Darren. Please. Just take Miller. Or French. She’s kinda hot, if she smiles at you,” I added, just before the EMTs closed the doors.
“I noticed,” Darren yelled. I laughed and closed my eyes.
I could feel Ginger with me. She wanted me to laugh. She had the most generous soul of anyone I had ever encountered.
And I would find whoever took her life, and took the boys. I promised Ginger that, as we rode to the hospital.
7
Obviously a slow day in the E.R. I was seen right away, and it was determined that I did not, in fact, have a concussion or any other brain damage.
“Can I get that in writing,” I said to the doctor. “About the brain damage, I mean. I might need to prove that some day.” The Cleary sense of humor: my nephews have been kidnapped and my twin sister murdered, but I will still crack wise. Inappropriate coping mechanisms? Me?
The doc looked at me. Apparently, he wasn’t used to our brand of humor.
“I will of course forward copies of our reports to your family doctor,” he began, and I stopped him.
“Not necessary. Let’s get this whole payment thing out of the way so I can get out of here, sweetie. Okay?”
Darren had said that he would pay, but I wanted to try something. At the front desk, I pulled the plastic wallet I’d found at Ginger’s out of my purse. I handed the billing secretary “my” American Express ca
rd. She swiped it through a scanner next to her computer. There was a short pause, during which I realized that I hadn’t put on deodorant after my shower that morning.
“Thank you, Ms. Cleary,” the woman said, glancing at me politely as she handed me back my card. “You have a nice day now.”
“I surely will,” I answered in my best California accent. Being in Orange County always did that to me. “Thank you so much.” And with that I walked out the emergency room door and into a cab someone was just getting out of. Good luck for me – taxis in Orange County are a rare occurrence. As I opened the back door of the car, I saw two cops enter the emergency room. I figured they might be looking for me.
I settled in, and sighed. A taxi. My home away from home.
“Can you take me to a bar, please?” I said to the driver. “Something within a couple of blocks of the Sunny Jim Motor Inn.” The driver looked at me in the rear view. So did I. I didn’t look all that bad, considering. Sleep and food on one side, getting conked on the head and throwing up on the other. It might have been a draw, but I think the sleep and food had won out.
We drove for about ten minutes, out of the stretch of office buildings where the hospital was located. I had no idea where we were. I had been down here more than a dozen times in the years Fred and Ginger had lived down here, but we didn’t tend to do the hospital tour.
Soon we were out of Newport, somewhere in Santa Ana, maybe. Definitely not as pricey as the palatial digs I had just left. More my territory, really. Small strip malls, all with adobe roofs. Lots of fast-food joints and Korean nail places. Target. K-Mart. 99 cent stores.
Cracked Page 8
