A Cup Full of Midnight

by Jaden Terrell

  Randall turned away from the Pepsi machine. “For Christ’s sake. What difference does it make?”

  She started to speak, then bit her lip and looked down at her lap.

  Caitlin sniffled, wiped her eyes with the heels of her hands. I kissed her on the top of the head, then pulled one of the chairs over and slid into it. Paulie came over and crawled into my lap. His hair smelled like oranges. Like Maria’s. He squirmed against my chest, and I realized I was holding him too tightly. Reluctantly, I loosened my grip.

  The clock on the wall ticked on, still no word about Josh.

  My left calf throbbed, probably from kicking in the bathroom door. I shifted in the chair, careful not to unseat Paul. Stretched the leg out in front of me and flexed the muscle. Despite the dull pain, it felt strong. I flexed again and thought about close calls and bad choices.

  Wondered what was taking so long.

  Randall came over and sat on the arm of the couch beside Wendy. She shifted away from him, ever so slightly. I wondered what that meant. Maybe nothing. It bothered me all the same.

  Time inched ahead. More waiting, more wondering, and finally, a doctor with a smudge of beard on his chin and a stethoscope around his neck pushed through the door. He looked barely old enough to drive, let alone to hold Josh’s life in his hands.

  “How is he?” Randall said.

  The doctor tipped his head toward Randall. “He’s out of immediate danger. He’s lost a lot of blood, but he’s stable for now.”

  “For now?”

  “All indications are, he’s going to be fine. Physically, at least. We have a psych consult lined up.”

  “When?”

  “Today, I hope. They have a heavy load this time of year.” He flashed a rueful smile. “Which one of you is Uncle Jared?”

  I slid out from under my son and stood up. “I am.”

  The doctor said, “He wants to talk to you.”

  I looked at Randall, who read the question in my eyes.

  “Go ahead,” he said roughly. “It’s what he wants.”

  I glanced at Wendy. She turned her face away, jaw tight. I looked back at the doctor and said, “All right.”

  He led me down the hall and through a set of swinging double doors. Our footsteps sounded loud on the polished tiles. A pretty blonde nurse in scrubs passed, pushing a cart piled with disposable pill cups and paper-wrapped syringes. She glanced up as we passed, gave me a sympathetic smile. I nodded back, feeling like an impostor. Stealing sympathy that should have been my brother’s.

  “Here we are,” the doctor said. He glanced at his watch. “You have ten minutes.”

  I took a deep breath, and the sharp smells of antiseptic and ammonia stung my nose and throat. I pushed open the door. Josh lay on his back, eyes closed, an IV dripping a clear liquid into his veins. Even against the white of the pillow, his face looked pale. The dark smudges beneath his eyes and the faded charcoal of his dyed hair seemed to float above the over-bleached blankets. He looked too young for sixteen. And too old.

  He needed a haircut. He needed . . . I wasn’t sure what.

  I moved to the bedside, watched him breathe. The bands around my lungs loosened, and I let out a quivering breath. He opened his eyes and said, “Hey.”

  “Hey.” I closed my fists over the metal handrail to keep my hands from trembling. There were a thousand things I wanted to say to him—What were you thinking? Why didn’t you call someone? Why didn’t you call me? And the million dollar question, Why? None of them seemed right.

  None of them seemed like enough.

  I settled for, “You had us worried there for awhile.”

  His lips strained upward in a smile that stretched the skin across his bones. “I had me worried too.”

  I cleared my throat and said, “Your family is outside.”

  “You’re my family too,” he said.

  “Josh—”

  He lifted a hand to silence me. Winced as the IV needle pinched the skin. “I wanted to talk to you first.”

  “Why?”

  To hurt my brother and his wife? He’d already done that. I glanced at the IV line, followed it down to the bruised flesh at the bend of his arm and then to the bandages taped tightly around each wrist. Tried not to think about what was beneath the bandages.

  He saw where I was looking and turned his palms toward the mattress.

  “I need a favor,” he said. “Not an Uncle Jared favor, a P.I. favor.”

  I frowned. What did a sixteen-year-old kid need with a private detective? “What kind of favor?”

  “I have $160 at home. I know it’s not enough, but . . . I want to hire you.”

  “You don’t need to hire me. If you need something, all you have to do is ask.”

  “I know. But this is, like . . .” He made a helpless gesture with his hands and winced again. “Huge.”

  “Try me.”

  “I want you to find out who killed Razor.”

  My mouth suddenly tasted sour. Before I could stop myself, I blurted, “That son of a bitch.”

  “It’s okay.” He gave me a weak, sardonic smile. “Tell me how you really feel.”

  Razor’s mother had named him Sebastian Edward Parker. Razor was the name he gave himself. Sharp. Bright. Dangerous. It was an affectation. He was a predator, but like a hyena, he preyed only on the weak. His sexual preferences ran to teenaged boys. Fifteen, sixteen. Give or take. Vulnerable. Alienated. Horny young guys drowning in confusion and testosterone.

  Boys like Josh.

  “He molested you,” I said.

  He looked away. Plucked at a frayed edge of the blanket. “I knew what I was doing.”

  “You were fifteen.”

  “Old enough.”

  “And he was pushing thirty.”

  “He wasn’t pushing thirty. He was only, like, twenty-five.”

  “He told you that, he lied. He was on the downhill side of twenty-nine. Too old to be—”

  “Stop,” he said. He wiped the back of his free hand across his eyes. “Just . . . It doesn’t matter now.”

  I let go of the bed rail and stalked to the window. Looked out through the shatterproof glass into not much of anything. A parking lot frosted by halogen lights, a black-silhouetted tree line, and beyond that, the lights of the apartment complex behind the hospital. They looked like scattered stars.

  “Please, Uncle Jared,” Josh said. “I need to know what happened to him. Why it happened.”

  It happened because he was a shit, I thought. Because sometimes bad things happen to bad people.

  It happened, maybe, because in spite of legal loopholes and sleazy lawyers, there was sometimes justice in the world.

  I turned back to the bed and said, “The police already have a suspect. Some girl he knew. Laurel O’Brien. She confessed.”

  A snort escaped him, something between a laugh and a sob. “Gimme a break. You met her. You really think she could—” He stopped. Closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “Do you think she could do what they said?”

  “When did I meet her?”

  “That time I ran away and you went looking for me. You know. She told you her name was Absinthe.”

  “Ah.” I remembered her then. An overweight girl in Goth makeup and a black satin gown too tight across the chest. Beneath her obnoxious façade, there was something about her I’d liked. “Why would she say she did it if she didn’t?”

  “I don’t know. But I need to know. What if it was—” His voice broke, and tears shone in his eyes. “I just need to know. Please, Uncle Jared?”

  Maybe I should have needed to know too, but the truth was I didn’t care who’d killed Razor. I just wished it had happened six months earlier, before he’d gotten to Josh.

  I said, “Those cops who came to your school—”

  “Don’t tell Mom and Dad. Please.”

  “What did they say to you?”

  “They think . . .” His mouth trembled.

  “They think what?”

&nb
sp; “The day he . . . Razor . . . died, I ditched school.”

  He didn’t have to put it together for me. A cannonball settled in my gut, and suddenly I cared who had killed Razor. I cared a hell of a lot. “They think you were with Absinthe. That you were in on it together.”

  “They didn’t say it, but I could tell, yeah.”

  “And that’s why you . . . ?”

  He turned his head away. “I don’t want to talk about that. Promise you won’t tell Mom and Dad about the cops.”

  “Josh, they’re going to find out.”

  “Not if you catch the guy first.”

  The room was silent except for an irritating buzz in one of the fluorescent lights. Josh gnawed at his lower lip. I thought about my brother, how he’d feel if he found out I’d kept a thing like this from him. I sneaked another glance at Josh’s wrists.

  “All right,” I said finally. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  The corners of his mouth tugged upward. “Thanks, Uncle Jared. You won’t be sorry.”

  I thought of my brother again. Forced a smile and kept my mouth shut.

  I was already sorry.

  CHAPTER THREE

  At eleven-thirty the next morning, I pushed through the double doors of the West precinct house and flashed my ID through the safety glass of the information booth in the lobby.

  “Frank Campanella,” I said.

  The guard inside, a skinny acne-scarred kid I’d never seen before, gave me a curt nod and went back to his dog-eared paperback. He’d get reamed for that if anybody who mattered caught him, but I wasn’t anybody anymore.

  Frank Campanella, my former partner, should have been in charge of Nashville’s Murder Squad. Instead, the new police chief had disbanded the unit, leaving only a small core of investigators to carry on as the Cold Case Division. Frank and the rest of the Homicide and Murder Squad detectives were sent to other precinct houses and served an entrée of break-ins and vandalism with an occasional murder or missing persons on the side. It was like feeding a grizzly on nothing but tofu and alfalfa sprouts.

  The idea was to make everybody equal, put an end to specialized investigations, get the guys out in the neighborhoods where they’d be working. It sounded good on paper.

  Frank’s new sergeant was a thirty-four-year-old green-eyed redhead named Kelly Malone. Until the shake-up, she’d never worked a homicide, but she was brassy and ballsy and looked good on the six o’clock news, where my ex-girlfriend, local anchor Ashleigh Arneau, made syrupy references to her as the “Debutante Detective.”

  Frank had the highest solve rate on the squad and more years on the force than Malone had been alive, but nobody cared about that. He was Old School, which meant he was Old News.

  His cluttered cubicle was two doors down from Malone’s office. He looked up and scowled when I rapped my knuckles on the edge of the cube. He had an open file in front of him and a Styrofoam cup in one hand. The cup had holly leaves printed on the side.

  “Let me guess,” he said. “You need a favor.”

  “What makes you think I didn’t just come by to visit an old friend?”

  “Don’t make me laugh.” He closed the folder and pushed it away. “I know that look.”

  I took the seat across from him, a black vinyl office chair with stuffing peeking from a split seam, and said, “I need to see the Parker file.”

  “The Parker file.”

  “You know. Sebastian Parker. Vampire wannabe. Ritual killing. Called himself Razor.”

  “I know who he is. What I don’t know is why you think I’m gonna get myself fired for giving you case files when you don’t work for us anymore.”

  “I’m not asking you to give it to me. I can look at it right here. We could go in the copy room and lock the door, if that will make you feel better.”

  “Not even if I wanted to.” He slumped in his chair, raked his fingers through his silvering hair. “I don’t have it. It’s not my case anymore. Malone gave it to Gilley and Robbins.”

  “Who the hell are Gilley and Robbins?”

  He barked a bitter laugh. “Fucking parking meter detectives. Part of some master plan to make us do the things we suck at.” He plucked a fat file folder from a sloppy stack of papers and shoved it across the desk at me.

  I picked it up and rifled through it. Peeping Tom. “You gotta be kidding me.”

  “Do I look like I’m kidding?”

  I slid the file back toward him. “So they get the homicides, you get the scut work?”

  “Malone sent them on a new case today. Dead guy on the porch, pissed-off wife with a shotgun. The Parker case, Gilley lost his lunch, and Robbins broke down and cried like a baby. So she sends them out to see some poor schmuck with his brains all over the porch.”

  “Amateurs.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. They’re good investigators. But what do they know about homicide? You know what our solve rate is these days? Forty percent.”

  Before the big upheaval, it had been eighty. You couldn’t blame Malone or the precinct commanders for that. Not entirely. There were other factors. Politics. A new police chief who didn’t understand that homicide was a different kind of crime and homicide detectives a different breed. I’d seen good beat cops broken by the sight of a butchered body, unable to leave their own houses without getting the shakes. Not the guys in homicide. In homicide, we know how to detach.

  “When it gets down to thirty,” I said, “maybe you’ll get your office back.”

  “If it gets down to thirty, I’ll die of shame and they can have the fucking office.”

  “But then I’d miss the pleasure of your scintillating conversation.” I leaned forward, put my hands flat on his desk, and said, “Frank, I need to see that file.”

  His eyebrows bunched together, wild silver bristles that made him look like a disgruntled badger. “I just told you, I don’t have it.”

  “But you could get it.”

  “Sure, if I wanted to spend my golden years saying, ‘Welcome to Walmart.’”

  I looked down at my lap. I knew Malone would pounce on an excuse to cut him loose, and I was asking him to risk both his pension and his reputation and give her one. It was a lot to ask. “I know I’m putting you on the spot,” I said. “But you know the case. I need to know what angle your guys are working.”

  “My guys?”

  “Your guys, Malone’s guys. Whoever they belong to, two of them went to Josh’s school yesterday and questioned him about Razor’s murder.”

  Frank raised an eyebrow. Rocked back in his chair. “S.O.P. You know that. He was intimate with the victim.”

  “He was molested by the victim.”

  “Okay.” His voice softened. “I misspoke. But he hung out with the guy for a long time. You don’t think he could shed some light?”

  “They called him out of the cafeteria in front of the whole school and then they made him think he was a suspect.”

  “You think they crossed the line?”

  “He went home and cut his wrists. What do you think?”

  His face went perfectly still. “What?”

  “He’s going to be okay, probably. If he doesn’t try it again.”

  “My God.”

  “So I need to know, Frank. Is he a suspect?”

  He rubbed his hands over his face, as if he’d just walked through a cobweb. “My best guess?” he said. “Probably. The O’Brien girl didn’t kill Parker and pose him on that pentagram all by herself. She had to have help. And witnesses place Josh and the girl together near the victim’s house an hour before the murder.”

  I tried to keep my expression neutral, but he knew me too well.

  He said, “Josh didn’t tell you about that?”

  “He told me he ditched school.”

  “That’s all?”

  “He didn’t do this, Frank. You’ve known him since he was, what, seven? You know he isn’t capable of this.”

  He gave a slow nod, as if his head were too heavy for his ne
ck. I wiped my palms, suddenly clammy, along the outside seam of my jeans. I wondered if he was remembering, like I was, the scrape-kneed, sunburnt, laughing boy Josh had been. If he was imagining, like I was, what prison might do to that same boy charged with a vicious crime and old enough to be tried as an adult.

  Then, “Wait here,” Frank said.

  A few minutes later, he came back and handed me a thick manila folder. “Do something with that and come on,” he said. “I gotta get out of here.”

  I stuffed the folder under my coat and zipped it inside. The coat was an Australian duster with a fleece lining. I liked the bomber jacket better, but I couldn’t get the bloodstains out. “What about Malone?” I asked.

  “Fuck her,” he said. He leaned across the desk and picked up the Styrofoam cup, downed the last of his coffee and crumpled the cup into a shapeless wad. “For this, I need a beer.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We pushed out onto the freshly salted sidewalk and into a skin-chapping cold that briefly glued my nostrils shut. The sky was a bitter gray, and needles of sleet stung our bare faces. I looked at Frank and said, “Where to?”

  “Let’s go to Tootsie’s. You drive.”

  Tootsie’s Orchid Lounge was a famous dive on Lower Broadway in the heart of downtown. We parked the Silverado in a public lot four blocks away. In good weather, it was a pleasant stroll. Today, the wind knifed through my coat and brought tears to my eyes. Halfway across the street, my ears were already numb.

  “You’re gonna give me pneumonia,” I groused. “Worse, you’re gonna get pneumonia, and then Patrice is gonna kill me.”

  His wife’s name evoked a grudging smile. “Damn straight. Can’t you hear it? ‘What were you thinking, dragging an old man out in the cold like that?’ ”

  “Not so old,” I said, trying to count it up. What was he? Sixty, sixty-one? Didn’t they say fifty was the new thirty? That would make sixty the new forty. Which would make me, what? The new sixteen?

  After awhile, he said, “I always thought I’d die in the traces.”

  “Things get too rough, you could come and work with me,” I said.

  “I’ve seen your office. That damn desk. It should have its own country. There’s not enough space for me and it in the same room.”