The Greeks of Beaubien Street

by Jenkins, Suzanne

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  It only took Gretchen one day to get into her new role. She’d had a complete transformation. Soud said she had never known a girl to adapt so quickly to the routine. When Gretchen left the hotel for the casino early Saturday morning, she felt like a glamour girl; a slightly drunk glamour girl that is. By the next evening when she had bathed and Soud dressed her in another gorgeous evening gown, she felt fine. The man who was her date that night introduced himself as Tommy. At least that was what she was to call him. She got over her disappointment at the lackluster clientele in the slot machine area when he took her to the private gaming rooms where the high rollers played. She fit in well in that milieu. The other women were also young and exquisitely dressed. They looked at her curiously. She was new in town; “Who does she work for?” they asked each other in whispers. Gretchen was confused, having forgotten about her obligation to Soud, but she just smiled and kept her mouth shut. I work at the bank, is that what they mean?

  On Sunday, Soud let her go out without being drugged. Gretchen asked her not to give her anything; she wanted to have fun with Tommy. The drugs were only to subdue any resistance a new recruit might be feeling, not to squelch their natural ability to enjoy themselves. Tommy was pleased with the real, animated Gretchen. She was still wearing shoes that were too big, but got used to walking in them. He promised to buy her new shoes that fit as soon as he was finished gambling. They made an odd couple: he was short, aging, and bald, and Gretchen was young, vibrant, beautiful. She was talkative Sunday night and having a great time, and wanted Tommy to know it.

  “This is the most fun I have ever had!” she exclaimed. She thought that if Mike had simply asked her if she wanted to try it out, she would have said yes. They didn’t have to drug me to go out with Tommy! He’s the sweetest guy! Tommy couldn’t believe his good fortune. He never had a woman who didn’t need forcing to be with him. This lovely creature was willing and eager. When Gretchen excused herself to go the ladies’ room, Tommy called Soud and praised her. Her fee would be paid in full. She didn’t waste any time clearing out of the suite. Tommy would bring Gretchen to Manhattan himself.

  The ladies’ room in the casino was a bright and clean oasis in the smoky, cavernous casino. The cool splendor of the sitting area reminded Gretchen of Joan Crawford’s bathroom in the movie Mommy Dearest. She liked the idea of having a wealthy, carefree life. Was that what Tommy was offering her? He was pleasant, he smelled good, and he treated her with respect. She decided that if it came to him asking her to be his girl, she would gladly accept. Her parents would never forgive her, but she couldn’t live with them forever, could she?

  As she washed her hands in the basin, she looked at her face in the mirror and smiled. Her life stretched out before her, comfortable, exciting and glamorous. She threw the paper towel in the trash can and opened the door out to the casino. At first she was confused; it was surreal. She saw him standing there, smiling at her, his face bright red, but it couldn’t be, could it? How could it be?

  “Daddy?”

  Chapter 23

  Jill didn’t hang around waiting for her relatives to descend from the suburbs. As bad as she felt about her cousin’s wife, she needed to get to work. She took her coffee and deep fried, cream filled breakfast and went to the precinct early. An exhausted looking Albert was already at his desk.

  “What the hell? Did you ever get home?” she asked surprised to see him at the office ahead of her.

  “We searched Parkers house last night. You will not believe what we found. Jacob Parker is in custody.” Jill plopped down in her chair after putting her breakfast on the desk. She remembered her vision.

  “What happened? Something worse than the video? I mean, this is amazing!” Jill said, feeling numb. Albert looked at her wax paper wrapped food longingly. Jill took a plastic knife out of her drawer and cut it in two, giving him the larger piece.

  “How do you stay so thin?” he asked while biting into it, cream-filling squirting out of the sides of his mouth. “Jacob’s not saying a thing, but that’s not surprising,” Albert continued. They had a lot to talk about. He told Jill about Soud Allahem; a coworker said that was who Mike Ahmed was taking Gretchen to see about a modeling job. Jill told Albert about the hotel video and the blood clots that were a match for Gretchen. Albert talked about the video which clearly showed Jacob and his daughter embracing intimately.

  The coup de grace was the bat. None of it meant a thing until they found the bat. Jacob had thrown it behind the furnace in their basement. It was damp, as though recently washed off. CSI was called in and a luminol test showed that it’d had blood on it at one time. However, the basement wasn’t the crime scene. They went over the floor with a magnifying glass and nothing came up. If “Daddy” did kill her, it didn’t happen in his house. Albert was waiting for confirmation that Gretchen’s DNA was on the bat.

  “What about the hotel? Wouldn’t we have seen Jacob entering the room?” Jill asked.

  “The tapes we saw are from the east end of the corridor looking at the adjoining room. We need to find out if there is a camera at the other end of the hall,” Albert said. “We need to put pressure on the casino to hand over their tapes as well. Their security staff was bombarded last night by a bunch of students who went on a theft spree. Our guys were over there until five.” It was clear to them from the hotel security tapes that Gretchen leaving her hotel room in an evening gown on the arm of an older man could mean she was headed to the casino.

  “I’ll go. You stay put. What time did you finish up this morning?” she asked.

  “We left Dearborn about three,” Albert said. “Marianne was hysterical, screaming for us to kill Jacob. It would have been funny if it wasn’t so tragic.” He fought back a yawn. “We need to do a timeline. There is still something not gelling.”

  Jill thought for moment. It was too obvious. Gretchen didn’t have one outward mark of violence on her body except for the laceration of her vagina and the fatal gunshot wound. Would Jacob have used the bat on his own daughter? The tape was disturbing enough, showing the embrace of a man with his naked daughter. But that wasn’t all the tapes revealed. No sexual activity between father and daughter had been recorded. He was simply a voyeur, one who liked to hug his daughter’s body and video tape himself doing it. Unless he wasn’t aware of the tapes.

  “I have a feeling Jacob didn’t place that camera in Gretchen’s closet. Do you feel it?” Jill asked. Albert thought about what she said, and nodded his head yes.

  “Well it’s clear we aren’t finished yet. You wait for the DNA results on the bat and I’ll search for more tapes,” Jill told Albert. She drank what was left of her coffee and put her father’s mug on a shelf next to her desk. That made two mugs. Three more to go.

  Jill walked to the elevator and pushed the down button. She was dragging this morning after little sleep. It was testimony to what bad news could do your body. The irrelevant thought that Dana had hated her passed through her head. Jill had tried to befriend her, but Dana wasn’t interested. Andy said he thought she was jealous of Jill’s education and freedom. Jill didn’t understand it. Dana had the money to go back to school, and the time. Her kids were fabulous, too. How could she even compare my life with hers? Of course, she was dead, so no amount of dissatisfaction would change anything. It was too late. Now Andy would be living in the city with his kids as he had dreamed. At least everyone there wanted to be there, she thought.

  She drove to the hotel and asked if there was a camera on the other side of the hallway from Gretchen’s room and also, on a whim, for tapes from the camera facing the street. The more complicated a case became, the more time it would take to view tapes and interview and document. It was part of the territory. Once back to the precinct, she and Albert spent the rest of the morning watching video and finally there it was, bold as daylight: Marianne Parker and her husband, leading their wayward, evening gown clad daughter back to her hotel room in Greektown. And then a half an hour later, the
y were leaving it, a disheveled looking Gretchen leaning between her mother and father, wearing what appeared to be sweatpants. In both instances, Marianne appeared to have something hidden under her jacket. A bat? Albert, who had fallen asleep, woke up when Jill moaned.

  “Marianne was with him. Marianne went to the hotel with Jacob. I wish we had a camera inside that room. What happened in there?” Jill had her head in her hands. “We need to go back to Dearborn and talk to Marianne,” she told Albert. He pulled himself up out of his chair and yawned. “I’ll drive,” Jill said. She wanted to be occupied one hundred percent. Imagining what may be taking place at Gus’s Greek Grocery was a distraction that she needed to squash. Driving would help.

  “You forget the blood in the tub,” he said.

  “No, I remember it. But the bullet is what killed her and no one heard gunfire. Plus, the three of them are clearly seen leaving her room together with Gretchen upright. If you are going to sleep through these videos, you will miss a few things, my friend,” she chided him. They took the stairs down to the parking garage and were silent on the ride into Dearborn. Albert thought about the video from Gretchen’s closet. At first when he found the camera, his mind said it was something the father planted there to spy on his daughter as she exited her bathroom. But the suspicion that the mother could have suspected something was going on between her husband and daughter, then planted the video camera herself, loomed large. Albert said what they were both silently thinking.

  “Filicide is very rare. I don’t think we have had a case here in years.”

  “It’s unheard of in my culture,” Jill offered.

  “Oh is that right? What about Medea?” Albert teased. “Do you think Euripides just pulled that one out of his hat?”

  “Okay, let me change that to in my family. I’m an American, remember? Besides, filicide is the killing of children in general, not just the parent killing the kid. Anyway, Medea did it to piss Jason off. I suppose children are never murdered in China?” She looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “You’re lucky you were born a boy,” Jill said under her breath. Albert grimaced.

  “You’re a cruel woman. My grandparents were born in White Plains. You know that crappy hospital we were at yesterday morning? I was born there. And I know you were too.” Albert said.

  “Yes. We have had this conversation before,” Jill sighed. “We must be losing it.” The tragic case was starting to take its toll on both of them after just two days. They fell silent again, thinking about Gretchen Parker.

  “If Jacob thought Gretchen had been having sex with Mike Ahmed, knowing what a racist Jacob was, it may have driven him into a jealous rage. He is a coward, so of course he wouldn’t kill the man. It would have been easier to kill the daughter,” Albert said.

  “Yes,” was all Jill could say. It would be easier to kill your own daughter. She thought of her father, his loving, patient ways, how tender and kind he was to her and her brother Chris. He was so respectful, and except for his slightly Puritanical views on sex and marriage, she couldn’t imagine him ever, in a million years, even arguing with her or harming her in any way

  The worst of it was that the bat did contain DNA from Gretchen, and cells from her cervix. Jill felt her gorge rise when Albert read the report in an email on his phone. The bat was an enigma because of its coating of DNA from every member of the household, including the cat. The handle had fingerprints from several people.

  Jill shut the engine off before they arrived at the Parker residence, allowing the cruiser to roll silently to a stop. Albert was staring out the window at the house, still not able to comprehend what they had concluded after seeing the results of the bat, and watching the surveillance videos from the hotel hallway, inside the casino, and at the main entrance on Beaubien. Jacob’s car, a classic nineteen sixty-five Cadillac, stood out like a sore thumb, and his wife, sitting in the front seat with her prim suit jacket on and ruffle-collared blouse, had been seething intensely enough for the security camera to pick up the emotion from a telephone pole down the street. Jill and Albert sat speechless, waiting for the Dearborn police to show up.

  In front of the Parkers’ house, Jill could see Marianne standing in the window behind the closed curtains. She would wait quietly for them to approach the house. It wouldn’t do much good to try and flee. Dressed in her signature polyester pants suit and crisp, white blouse, her hair dyed and arranged in an out-of-fashion style, she looked and felt much older than sixty-two.

  How did it happen that she would adopt her husband’s age and sensibility? She really loathed him. She thought of the years she worked as a secretary in an insurance office. It was good work, didn’t take a lot of emotional energy to process insurance claims and answer the phone. She had her own money, a lovely child, a nice home. And then she thought of her daughter. Her daughter had become an icon. She represented everything that was good about life. Gretchen was proof of her goodness, of her worthiness. She was happy in spite of being married to a reprobate because she had Gretchen and Gretchen was their common ground.

  Until the slip-up. It had happened so unexpectedly that Marianne almost missed it. It was a morning like any other morning. She was puttering around her light-filled kitchen getting their breakfast ready and Gretchen came down, looking fresh and lovely from her shower after a run, a sparkling white, virginal terry-cloth bathrobe on, and while Marianne’s back was to her family, she saw her daughter open her robe up to her father, who was sitting and drinking his morning coffee. Marianne could see their reflection in the shiny chrome of the toaster.

  She might have dismissed it if they would have ended their encounter there. However, she saw Jacob look up toward his wife to see if she was occupied, and then back to the body of his daughter and Marianne saw him reach with his hand and caress, what? Gretchen’s breast? It was only because of years of self-control from having lived with him and biting her tongue that she didn’t whip around and lash out at both of them. She waited until they were finished, seconds really was as long as it lasted, and then fled the room. She went up the stairs to her own bedroom and left them alone in the kitchen, something that was the norm in their household. Why not? Who doesn’t leave her husband alone with their daughter? She suddenly became aware of other times in the recent past that may have been inappropriate, but she was so removed from such behavior, so sure of her husband’s love for his daughter, that nothing underhanded or perverse ever had crossed her mind.

  Now, Marianne thought of seemingly innocent wrestling matches between the two of them in which Gretchen appeared to be naked under her nightgown, or times that she would find Jacob sitting on Gretchen’s bed and the two of them talking in hushed voices. She never thought anything of it until this particular day. There was a time in the distant past that Gretchen had complained to Marianne about Jacob coming into her bed at night. Jacob denied any wrongdoing, saying he must have been sleepwalking. So if they had been doing something under this roof, if her adult daughter was not the picture of innocence Marianne had built her up to be, there were ways to find out.

  There was a technical store not far from their house, one in which she and Jacob weren’t known as customers, and Marianne told the clerk that she wanted a video camera to spy on her cleaning lady who she was sure was stealing. She was to mount the tiniest camera she had ever seen right inside Gretchen’s closet door. She never closed her closet, so it would be perfect place to spy, aiming it at the bathroom door and her bed. If anything happened in there, Marianne would soon find out.

  Shortly after Jill turned the car off, a Dearborn unmarked car pulled up behind them. It was Aaron Barry again. Albert introduced Jill to Officer Barry. The three of them walked up to the front door, Jill aware of neighbors peering at them. A member of this household had been murdered; it was a house of curiosity now. Marianne opened the door for them before they knocked.

  “We would like to talk to you, Mrs. Parker. May we come in?” Albert asked. Marianne stood aside for them, holding the door o
pen for the officers. Albert had been in the house the night before with a search warrant and was startled, if not shocked, at its stark sterility. It was impersonal as a hotel. The daughter’s bedroom looked as though it had recently been redecorated though Marianne said it had always been like that, since Gretchen was a little girl. Albert had an idea and he gave Jill a look with his eyebrows raised. She gave him an almost imperceptible nod. They would reveal all the evidence. Marianne pointed a finger at the sofa.

  “Do you want to sit in here? Or should we go into the kitchen?” she asked. The little house didn’t have a dining room. Albert thought the kitchen might be more comfortable for Marianne and he wanted her guard down. They followed behind her, sitting down around the table. Albert was right across where Marianne would be. She was poised to get them refreshments, but no one wanted anything. She pulled out a chair and reluctantly sat down. Albert pulled a small recording device out of his pocket.

  “Okay if I record this?” he asked. Marianne shook her head yes. Jill was watching the woman closely and could feel the blood draining out of her face. Did Marianne Parker kill her own daughter? Was she preparing to confess to such a heinous crime? In a jealous rage, angry that her daughter was having sex with her father, did Marianne Parker first rape her daughter with a baseball bat, and then shoot her to death? The hows and whys weren’t clear to Jill yet; when she saw the entire scene play out before her eyes, the shooter’s form was unclear to her. The blood in the bathtub was from the injury to Gretchen’s vagina. She must have lost at least a pint of blood by the sound of what the plumber found in the drain, clotted enough that it had stopped the drain up.